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A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) is a computer audio interface driver protocol for digital audio specified by Steinberg, providing high data throughput, synchronization, and low latency between a software application and a computer's audio interface or sound card.
Network cards; Sound cards; PC chipsets; Power and battery management; Local buses of various sorts—in particular, for bus mastering on modern systems; Low-bandwidth I/O buses of various sorts (for pointing devices such as mice, keyboards, etc.) Computer storage devices such as hard disk, CD-ROM, and floppy disk buses (ATA, SATA, SCSI, SAS)
When the sound card uses a custom driver for use with the system supplied port class driver PortCls.sys or implements a mini-driver for use with the streaming class driver, applications can bypass the KMixer completely and use the kernel streaming interfaces instead to directly interact with audio driver and reduce latency. Windows 98 includes ...
Motherboards typically do not have any more than eight built-in output channels (7.1 surround sound) and four input channels (back and front panel microphone inputs, and a back-panel stereo line-in). Users requiring more audio I/Os will typically opt for a sound card or an external audio interface , as these provide additional features that are ...
Audio interfaces are closely related to computer sound cards, but whereas sound cards are optimized for audio playback an audio interface is primarily intended to provide low-latency analog-to-digital and digital format conversion for professional audio applications.
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers. Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were automatic configuration of sound-card hardware and graceful handling of multiple sound devices in a system.
Windows Sound System (WSS) is a sound card specification developed by Microsoft, released at the end of 1992 for Windows 3.1. It was sold as a bundle which included an ISA sound card, a microphone , a pair of headphones and a software package.