ALSA soundcard in ASL

After signing up for AllStarLink and installing the image, I was very surprised to learn that there is no option for using an ALSA soundcard in ASL. I already have no fewer than 20 USB interfaces, none of which work with ASL.

After some searching, I found a bit of information on a project to implement ALSA that is nearly a decade old and seems to have gone nowhere. Why is the system bound to a 20-year-old chip?

I will probably attempt to implement ALSA myself (I am generally familiar with Asterisk), but I will first have to build on OS using (by software standards) an ancient kernel before I can even compile the ASL source.

Is anyone else working on this?

Since ASL works fine with a $4 sound fob ( https://www.ebay.com/itm/272374780193 ), I don’t suppose there is a lot of push to do anything more sophisticated.

As an experiment, I compiled ASL on Centos 7 the other day (w/ minor changes) and it seemed to go well. I have not finished that project though…

ALSA just gives more options. Virtually any USB (or otherwise) audio card you might come across will work with it. Several of the radios I own have USB audio connections direct–no fob even necessary. It seems ridiculous to do a bunch of soldering and cable-making when a simple USB cable could do the job just fine.