Yes yes. The existence of that silliness is kind of my point. There's nothing "wrong" with Linux audio from a technical/feature standpoint. But the aesthetics are a frothing mess. It's not a clean design.

The /dev/audio device on SunOS 4.1 was a clean design (albeit one that solved a much simpler problem). That sanity wasn't preserved in the march to modernity, and it sucks.

The design is pretty similar to how every other modern OS does it, I think - what would you change if you had the choice?

I mean, it's not as clean as things were, but we've come a long way since then in terms of features so obviously simplicity is going to suffer. Worth the trade off, in my opinion :)

You can also use pacat

Example: `cat /dev/urandom | pacat`