I sort of disagree. ALSA didn't really have difficulty mixing multiple playback streams unless you go back really far. dmix works quite well. It has a lot of problems, particularly dealing with routing, hot plugging, etc. but the dmix stuff always worked more or less fine for me, as long as I had it configured. otoh, pulse took quite a while to mature in my opinion, and had plenty of issues with this basic functionality over time, though I will at least be fair and say that it got blamed for a lot of ALSA driver issues and other nonsense too. (I think up until recently it was defaulting to doing resampling with a Speex resampler that suffered from fairly noticable aliasing in many cases, as a result of the projects paranoia to be seen as a resource hog...)
That and bitbanging audio through GPIO or otherwise bypassing the ALSA stack doesn't seem all that unreasonable. I can't find any specific information about it with LibreElec/etc. but it would not surprise me.
Oh well. I think Pipewire has a lot of potential today. It brings much improvement to routing and session management for audio and the hybrid scheduler design and considerations for pro audio use cases makes it very promising. I hope the need to bypass the Linux audio stack can disappear.
That and bitbanging audio through GPIO or otherwise bypassing the ALSA stack doesn't seem all that unreasonable. I can't find any specific information about it with LibreElec/etc. but it would not surprise me.
Oh well. I think Pipewire has a lot of potential today. It brings much improvement to routing and session management for audio and the hybrid scheduler design and considerations for pro audio use cases makes it very promising. I hope the need to bypass the Linux audio stack can disappear.