レナート   Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz   ﻟﻴﻨﺎﺭﺕ

Posted by Karl Zollner at Wed Jul 11 11:06:20 2007
Hey there Leonard,

I just wanted to that your references to Open Sound System are somewhat antiquated. I am sure you are a busy man but have you had a chance to look at OSS 4.0(ie. the new version which was just GPL'ed) ?

I have been using Pulseaudio for almost a year now-I used it in conjunction with ALSA and for the most part it worked fairly well.

Yet when OSS was rendered opensource a couple of weeks ago I decided to give it a try-download, compiled and installed it from source.

I can only say WOW. I use Gentoo and I had compiled all of my programs with support for (alsa,oss,pulseaudio,arts and esd-ie. coverigng all bases). Upon installing I needed to make 0 changes to my system and all of my apps work flawlessly with the new OSS-wow again, wow.

Firstly exclusive access to soundcard is a thing of the past- apps which used to only have exclusive access via the old OSS API work flawlessly with the new 4.0 API and no longer preclude other applications from using the device.

ie. Enemy-territory(FPS) and TeamSpeak were both written to use the old OSS API- to run both at the same time you needed 2 sounds cards until now-now with 4.0 i can both at the same time on a crappy motherboard-builtin AC97 audio-something that ALSA and dmix can't do.

Of course OSS 4.0 hasn't been integrated yet into the the system- no HAL integration, or integration with gnome-mixer or Pulseaudio(hint, hint). The OSS guys have said they will work with the kernel ALSA guys. OSS also has per-application volume control-yet there is no way to change the default audio device on the fly-a feature which Pulseaudio has and which I sorely miss.

Though I don't wish to downplay the importance of and the good work of the ALSA guys-I am really impressed by 4.0. It used to be that OSS supported more cards than ALSA-now the situation has reversed. Yet I can't help but thinking that the OSS 4.0 API is much, much cleaner and simpler. And of course OSS supports much more than Linux-unlike ALSA. I hope the OSS and ALSA communities can work together-perhaps porting newer ALSA driver over to OSS-or cleaning up ALSA with improvements from OSS-no idea how this will work out.

Please keep up the good work on Pulseaudio-when this baby mature it is going to be really, really nice. Also please look at the new OSS and hopefully it won't prove to difficult to integrate support for it into pulseaudio....

Posted by lari at Sun Jul 22 23:44:31 2007
@lennart: How do you think will the open sourcing of OSS influence the development of pulseaudio? Are there new possibilities/difficulties/conflicts?

Posted by Lennart at Wed Jul 25 00:47:14 2007
To be honest I don't really care about OSS being open sourced or not. ALSA won and that's not going to change any time soon. PA supports both ALSA and OSS. ALSA support in PA will get a lot more love than OSS support will. Why? Because everyone is going to be using ALSA and not OSS.

Posted by h3sp4wn at Thu Nov 29 19:14:58 2007
Everyone ? (certainly not me or anyone who has tried both Alsa and OSS 4.0 about using ice1712/ice1724 (envy24/envy24ht). The Alsa guys continually break support for these cards.

(And not everyone even uses Linux). Currently Dtrace and ZFS are much more interesting than anything Linux has to offer.