ANNOUNCING: Open Sound System for FreeBSD

Mon Mar 24 08:50:28 PST 1997

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 24, 1997

Contact: Dev Mazumdar

4Front Technologies
11698 Montana Avenue, Suite 12
Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A.

Tel: (310) 820 7365		E-mail: info at 4front-tech.com
Fax: (310) 826 2465             Web: http://www.4front-tech.com
_____________________________________________________________________________

	      Open Sound System for FreeBSD 2.2 Announced!

LOS ANGELES: 4Front Technologies is announcing the availability of Open Sound 
System(TM) for FreeBSD 2.2 also known as OSS/FreeBSD. OSS/FreeBSD provides 
sound card drivers for most popular sound cards under FreeBSD. These drivers
support digital audio, MIDI, Synthesizers and mixers found on sound cards. 

OSS/FreeBSD provides a user-friendly GUI which makes the installation of sound
drivers and configuration of sound cards very simple! OSS/FreeBSD supports
Plug-n-Play (PnP) soundcards. OSS/FreeBSD supports over 150 brand name sound
cards as well as sound chipsets found in laptops and motherboards with 
integrated audio.

OSS/FreeBSD drivers support automatic sound card detection, plug-n-play, and
can be dynamically loaded and unloaded into the kernel. There is no need for
recompiling kernels or editing cryptic configuration files to enable sound
support in FreeBSD. OSS/FreeBSD will support most of the older VoxWare (now
known as Open Sound System) audio applications as well as Java audio.

4Front is also pleased to introduce its SoftOSS technology for FreeBSD. 
SoftOSS provides a software based wave-table engine that can render MIDI
and MOD music files without requiring any special wave-table hardware. Any 
16bit soundcard can now playback MIDI music via wave-table synthesis.
SoftOSS provides real-time mixing of up to 32 audio channels. SoftOSS is
ideally suited for game developers and audio/video conferencing. More 
information on SoftOSS can be found at http://www.4front-tech.com/softoss.html

In addition to SoftOSS, 4Front is also introducing the Direct Music API which
allows the Yamaha FM synthesizer found on most sound cards to be used in
applications other than MIDI music. By giving direct access to the registers,
users can apply the FM synthesizer  to may different applications such as
acoustic modeling, signal and tone generation, sound effects and many more.

Finally, OSS/FreeBSD also supports the professional audio hardware like the
Zefiro Acousics ZA2 card which can be used with professional studio equipment
as well as DAT players for recording and playing back multichannel audio.

OSS/FreeBSD sound drivers comply with the Open Sound System API specification.
FreeBSD users can visit 4Front's WWW site at http://www.4front-tech.com/
to download a "free" trial version of OSS/FreeBSD or buy a fully licensed 
version of OSS/FreeBSD for only $20.00. The licensed version of OSS/FreeBSD 
comes with free technical support and free updates to the drivers.

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