OSS

[Michal Varga]

On Wed, 2011-03-09 at 17:58 -0800, Gary Dunn wrote:
> Sounds like FreeBSD has OSS by default. Thanks for the help.
> 
> Squeak is far more than a programming language. It is a complete GUI.
> Among its many classes is support for sound. On Unix this requires OSS
> or NAS.
> 
> I am preparing to build my own Squeak virtual machine in order to add
> support for DBus, to intercept session ending to perform an orderly
> exit. This page mentions OSS in section one, note three:
> 
> http://www.squeakvm.org/unix/download.html 
> 
> More about Squeak at http://www.squeak.org/
> 

I see, now I think it's clear whar you're trying to achieve. In that
case, you have two basic options...

First, as mentioned before, is to use Squeak's native OSS capabilities
and let it talk to OSS directly. That may be either FreeBSD's default
OSS, or, if in some exotic case FreeBSD's sound drivers don't work well
with your hardware, you can try 4Front's OSS implementation (port
audio/oss) which comes with its own set of kernel drivers. With either
FreeBSD's virtual channels (man pcm) or 4Front's software mixer,
multiple applications can talk to OSS simultaneously, including both OSS
and PulseAudio applications (with PulseAudio itself running atop of OSS
in the common scenario).

Then the other possibility, as you first mentioned better Gnome
integration, is to reroute Squeak's OSS output through PulseAudio, which
will feed it back to OSS anyway, but only after doing any extra steps
you'd like to have done on it (i.e. for software mixing and/or volume
control done inside PulseAudio, redirecting the stream through other
PulseAudio sinks, or simply for having a nice icon in Gnome showing that
your application is playing sound). As obviously Squeak can't talk to
PulseAudio natively, it can be still achieved through padsp wrapper
provided from PulseAudio (man padsp), though for common situations,
that's already an unnecessary overkill.


m.

-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)