As kind of a followup to my Guide to Linux Sound APIs here're some pretty graphics I just drew. (At least "pretty" to the degree of my limited drawing abilities). It's a block diagram depicting the Linux audio stack. A lot of people already drew something similar, and often enough the result was horribly complicated and -- in its conclusion disappointing. So, here's my try:

The components interface each other across the horizontal lines. The vertical lines seperate unrelated components. The drawing only includes modern, supported APIs and systems as described in the aforementioned blog article. It (hopefully) shows that things in the Linux audio world are not all that bad at all and we have workable answers for most questions without too much complexity, although they might not entirely make everyone overly happy.

In an outburst of bias I completely ommited KDE-specific technologies from this drawing. I guess even if I would have included them it'd be called biased anyway, so why bother? Also, they would have distracted the reader and complicated the drawing considerably due to KDE's affection for pluggable backends. So: if you care about KDE, please ignore this diagram.