Does anyone compose music using any of the portsfromthe/ports/audio collection in FreeBSD?

[Axel Auweter]

Hi,

>Dev Mazumar of 4Front Tech wrote here some time ago they had/were working on 
>an alsa emulation in (commercial) OSS. Perhaps he can comment on the status 
>of it right now (and if it's going to be available in the FreeBSD versions of 
>OSS).
>  
>
Yes, would be great to hear about that. Maybe, the problem is already 
solved and I just didn't know about it...

>>Does anybody know, whether there are any plans or ongoing projects to
>>create a better sound architecture for FreeBSD than OSS?
>>    
>>
>It's rather a question of making applications support !ALSA or at least some 
>middleware. Inventing yet another API and replacing OSS with it will not 
>produce application support out of thin air (but instead would leave FreeBSD 
>without any application support at all).
>
I totally agree with you: another API isn't worth the work. But it seems 
to me that more and more projects are focussing on ALSA and it may be 
hard to keep them all compatible with OSS or some middleware. I think 
the reason for a lot of programmers to use ALSA is its better latency. 
I'm too new to this topic, so I cannot judge whether ALSA is really that 
much better, but if it defeats OSS, FreeBSD will need to support the 
API, one day.

I think, I'm going to collect some information about ALSA (although it 
doesn't seem to be documented very well). An ideal solution would be to 
have a FreeBSD implementation (or even better: OS independent) of the 
ALSA Library which works together with the existing ALSA drivers. Any 
volunteers? ;-)

Does anybody know which parts of ALSA are GPL'ed and which are LGPL'ed?

Axel