Tutorial: Install and configure ALSA sound modules in Gentoo

ALSA is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a project dedicated to the development of a high-quality Linux sound subsystem. It has replaced OSS (Open Sound System) as default sound subsystem in the 2.6 kernel series.

ALSA provides efficient support for all types of audio interfaces, is fully modularized, is SMP and thread-safe and provides a high-quality user space library called alsa-lib to simplify application programming. It also provides a backwards compatibility layer with OSS.