Products · Product
ALSA
Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2009–2024), in 13 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Manual audio configuration leaves audio broken and hard to undoUnreviewed
20092026- Manual ALSA audio configuration leaves audio broken and hard to undo2022-12-09
- ALSA has serious problems with audio routing and hot plugging devices2022-09-16
- Very hard to figure out how to tweak ALSA audio settings2021-08-03
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 14 complaints
- Hard to configure a USB microphone and unable to raise its sample rate2024-08-07
- Manual ALSA audio configuration leaves audio broken and hard to undo2022-12-09
- ALSA has serious problems with audio routing and hot plugging devices2022-09-16
- Hard to switch audio outputs or adjust per-app volume; needed hardcoded device strings and scripting2021-12-27
- Very hard to figure out how to tweak ALSA audio settings2021-08-03
- Confusing configuration file that is hard to understand2020-09-12
- Misconfigured ALSA requires expert-level text editing to fix, unlike plug-and-play ASIO2020-02-23
- Too many abstraction layers and distro-specific configuration methods hide hardware details from users2019-12-10
- Routing and DAPM graphs are stringly typed and hard to get right2019-12-10
- Audio devices come up in wrong order and needed manual asound.conf and alsamixer fixes2018-06-24
- Could never figure out how to configure 5.1 audio due to complexity2018-03-05
- Hard to configure USB sound; documentation is poor and examples are hard to generalize2017-10-12
- ALSA's behavior is inconsistent and unpredictable for developers2013-02-08
- Audio stutters and glitches; low-latency multi-track recording is not reliably achievable on Linux2009-09-15