OSS Audio

[Freddie Cash]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 2:30 AM, Sid <sid at bsdmail.com> wrote:

> That's good that Jack isn't needed.
> It appears, as of the last few months or year, OSS is able to play sounds
> from different programs simultaneously.
>

​FreeBSD has had the ability to play sounds from multiple programs
simultaneously since the 4.x days.  Back then, the kernel developed a
"virtual channels" layer to accommodate this (program X uses /dev/dsp0,
program Y uses /dev/dsp1, program Z uses /dev/dsp2, audio is mixed and
played out the speakers together).  Later this was done automatically by
multiple programs simply accessing /dev/dsp.

This was one of the nicer features of FreeBSD 4.x; especially considering
the giant cluster-F that audio was on Linux at the time.  Their OSS
implementation was limited to a single program accessing /dev/dsp at a
time, and led to the development of all kinds of userland audio daemons and
mixers, and started them down the road to ALSA and eventually PulseAudio
(rather than simply fixing the issue in their OSS implementation).

KDE 3.x on FreeBSD 4.x was a multimedia wonder and so easy to get working
compared to KDE 3 on Linux.  KDE 4 and Phonon made this even nicer.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com