OSS4 support

[deniseweird]

After having tons of problems with ALSA, and also the new Pulseaudio, I have finally found peace in GNU/Linux by just using OSS4. It works just like it should, and it is the standard for most free systems. So could you please add OSS4 support for sound on the Unix/Unix-like ports? It would make me very happy ^^;;

[Squall-Leonhart]

doesn't the unix ports use SDL for audio?

[mudlord]

I'm not surprised at all about you having severe issues with ALSA. In my limited Linux experience, ALSA gave me nothing but hell:

Insane Coding: The Sorry State of Sound in Linux (http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/05/sorry-state-of-sound-in-linux.html)

Nach's blog explains it all.

Plus, he is the resident Linux developer on our team, so I bet I know what API he will use for our Linux audio system in the new Qt-based emulator, and I am laying my bets it ain't ALSA, thank God. :D

[Omegainf]

On the contrary, for me OSS is pure hell while I have no problems at all using ALSA! =)

[mudlord]

Now that is odd :/!

I just wish Linux had a unified sound API and not all the BS it has now with all the different APIs..

[deniseweird]

On the contrary, for me OSS is pure hell while I have no problems at all using ALSA! =)

Did you use OSS4?

@Squall-Leonhart: Yes we have SDL sound. But it just routes sound to another sound server, like ALSA or OSS. I think it's better if OSS is used directly.

@mudlord: Thank god it's not ALSA atleast. I am very confident about this project now :) The decision to use Qt already made me very happy.

[@ruantec]

Now that is odd :/!

I just wish Linux had a unified sound API and not all the BS it has now with all the different APIs..

That´s why am not a linux fan ;)

[deniseweird]

And what are you trying to say really?

[Spacy]

I'm not surprised at all about you having severe issues with ALSA. In my limited Linux experience, ALSA gave me nothing but hell:

Insane Coding: The Sorry State of Sound in Linux (http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/05/sorry-state-of-sound-in-linux.html)

Nach's blog explains it all.

Plus, he is the resident Linux developer on our team, so I bet I know what API he will use for our Linux audio system in the new Qt-based emulator, and I am laying my bets it ain't ALSA, thank God. :D



Another very good article by Nach. When I install Linux next time, I'll try to use OSS instead of ALSA, since I never liked ALSA because of poor mixer GUIs.

[deniseweird]

Just make sure it's OSS4. The OSS3.x wouldn't give you much difference I think. But all my sound problems are gone now when I switched from ALSA to OSS, so I really recommend it. :) The only downside is distributors still pick ALSA, but if we nag enough, we can change that.

[mudlord]

Just make sure it's OSS4. The OSS3.x wouldn't give you much difference I think. But all my sound problems are gone now when I switched from ALSA to OSS, so I really recommend it. The only downside is distributors still pick ALSA, but if we nag enough, we can change that.

And thats what I find amazing. Even though there are better alternatives to ALSA, like OSS4, people still blindly pick it up solely due to licensing. I know several perfect examples which this happened. I would have thought that picking the best thing for the job technically is the right way to do things, and not to pick things just because of a little political issue.

EDIT: And a confirmation: Nach will use OSS + OpenAL for the Linux sound backend. :)

[Dualscreenman]

It's like when people refuse to use proprietary graphics drivers and instead use free open source ones that are piss-poor functionality-wise compared to the ones provided by their graphics card developer.

[mudlord]

It's like when people refuse to use proprietary graphics drivers and instead use free open source ones that are piss-poor functionality-wise compared to the ones provided by their graphics card developer.

Exactly, which makes me wonder why the heck people do it in the first place. And I thought the distro issues were bad....

[deniseweird]

I understand completely why proprietary software is bad and I don't encourage it. I am looking forward to replacing my proprietary Nvidia drivers when we have free drivers. But OSS4 is released under the GPL (And CDDL and BSD licences for other systems). There are no real political reasons not to use it, other than being paranoid that they might go proprietary again.

I am glad to hear we get OSS support! :D

[Surkow]

Exactly, which makes me wonder why the heck people do it in the first place. And I thought the distro issues were bad....

A lot of people choose open source drivers instead of closed source drivers because they do offer better quality and integration in the kernel (like drivers for the old generation ATI graphics cards).

@deniseweird - Since it's released under the GPL they could always fork OSS4 if it's going proprietary again. I really hope OSS4 is going to be added to the repositories for my current distribution.

[deniseweird]

My point exactly. I feel more at home at the free software camp, and there's nothing wrong with using OSS4 even politically. If they decide to go proprietary we have a free version wich works better than anything else, and we can always use/develop that.

[nickxx]

from my exp the OSS4 still have bad sound quality compared to my proprietary drivers, maybe is my graphics card.

[deniseweird]

I don't quite follow you. OSS4 is the Open Sound System version 4. What would be the proprietary alternative to OSS4, wich you are using?

[Dualscreenman]

Drivers for his soundcard, I think.

[Spacy]

I just tried OSS4 with Fedora 8, but it isn't officially supported by Fedora. The speaker test tools worked fine with my Audigy 2 ZS, but Fedora uses the PulseAudio framework to handle all the different kinds of sound APIs. I really tried to set up PulseAudio correctly to use my new OSS device as the default sound output, but I always got problems with PulseAudio's OSS-module. On top, the graphics ossxmix mixer uses 100% CPU when running and is not very user friendly because of loads of controls.

Unfortunately, ALSA works, but also has a lot of flaws. For example, when navigating through a video, it produces strange sounds for a moment as if the sample frequency is being changed to something stupid.

[deniseweird]

Well, that's the biggest problem now, distributors still don't officially support OSS4. I don't think you can use both PA and OSS4 at the same time. How you smoothly remove PA (and alsa for that matter) I don't know though..

About the mixer GUI. The same problem applies here. If OSS4 was integrated in distributions properly we could have just used the volume control in KDE/GNOME. But of course it shouldn't use 100% still, talk to the OSS devs about that and they will probably try to fix it.