On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10/25/2011 08:11 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Nikos Chantziaras<[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> On 10/25/2011 07:17 PM, Michael Mol wrote: >>>> >>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Mark Knecht<[email protected]> >>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Paul Hartman >>>>>> >>>>>> Or that commercial linux sound driver package... I don't even remember >>>>>> what it was called anymore. >>>>> >>>>> OSS I think - something like Open Sound System or some such other >>>>> crazy thing, being it was neither Open nor most of the time for me >>>>> produced Sound on my System. ;-) >>>>> >>>>> I think there is still support for it in the kernel. Go figure... >>>> >>>> It's only been deprecated for over a decade...I can only barely >>>> remember a time before ALSA was pulled into the mainline kernel. >>> >>> OSS is the standard sound system for Unix still to this day though. >>> Everybody uses it, except Linux. >>> >>> It's GPL by the way. I actually use it on my main PC ;-) On supported >>> sound cards, it works much better than ALSA. Not the version in the >>> kernel, >>> of course, that one is deprecated. The newest version is v4 and is only >>> available out-of-kernel. >> >> I imagine that it's support for the cards it supported in that time >> period was probably better than ALSA. I came to Linux looking for a >> platform to replace Windows to support Avid's ProTools. As I soon >> learned that wasn't going to happen, at least not soon, and it hasn't >> changed in the 10-15 years I've been using Linux. However in those >> days my need for ALSA was driven by OSS not supporting any sound card >> hardware that was of interest to people recording music. ALSA was at >> least trying, and has gotten much better over the years with things >> like Jack and rt-sources which easily outperforms Windows in terms of >> latency. > > That's true. Though I judge by desktop needs on my machine. The lack of a > per-application volume mixer in ALSA is really frustrating. And if you bark > about it, you're told to install PulseAudio, which is another can of worms > entirely :-/ I guess I'm gonna be using OSSv4 for as long as that old > Soundblaster Live I have here refuses to die.
Agreed; per-app volume controls are nice. The Linux-specific nature of ALSA isn't such a good thing. Though if ALSA implements an OSSv4 wrapper, that's not so bad. (Not that I think they're likely to; if the wrapper exposes more functionality than their core supports, it'll greatly complicate their architecture.) I also kinda miss being able to test audio with cat. I have a t-shirt somewhere which says "cat /boot/vmlinux > /dev/audio # The sound of Linux". That was my quote for my high school's Science Olympiad team T-shirt. Being able to record audio files using the reverse was also very convenient, as was testing microphone settings by dumping the device to the terminal. -- :wq
