Syncing with 4Front

[4Front Technologies]

Scott Long wrote:

> Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> 
>> 4Front Technologies <dev at opensound.com> wrote:
>>
>>> As 4Front Technologies gets ready to announce OSS v4.0 later this year
>>> (the 10th anniversary of OSS), we'd like to offer our assistance.
>>
>>
>>
>> Since my personal opinion is to sync with the official OSS API, I'm very
>> pleased to hear that. What kind of assistance do you offer?
>>
>>> ALSA is way too complex at the API layer but still very similar to OSS
>>> at the driver level (naturally since they started from OSS!). We have
>>> developed a ALSA<->OSS library called SALSA (for Simple ALSA) that gives
>>> you some level of translation between the few ALSA-only apps and OSS
>>> compatible drivers and it's under LGPL and we can talk about BSD
>>> licensing it if you find it useful. See:
>>> http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=296
>>
>>
>>
>> Since those apps which use ALSA most likely will be part of the ports
>> collection but not of the base system, I think this isn't really 
>> needed to
>> be adopted by us. SALSA can just be part of the ports collection too.
>>
> 
> Actually,having an enabling API that is tied to the OS like SALSA seems
> to be is a very good thing to have in the base system.  Why drive the
> ports team nuts with it breaking at the drop of a hat every time someone
> tweaks the kernel sources?
> 
> I'm highly in favor of enabling technologies like this.  It makes
> everyone's lives easier.
> 
> Scott


Hi Scott,

The reason we had to design SALSA is that the Linux distros started
shipping ESD/KMIX/Gnome-volume-control only compiled with ALSA support.
This doesn't affect FreeBSD because compiling these apps on FreeBSD
correctly picks up the OSS API.

Anyway, the source is available for SALSA (based on ALSA 1.0.7) and it's
probably already incompatible with ALSA 1.0.9 released a couple of days
ago. 4Front doesn't have the bandwidth to keep tracking ALSA every day
of the week to see what changed (we got hopelessly out of sync in just
one week when we tried developing a shim module - see the cuckoo
project at: http://www.opensound.com/cuckoo.html

There will be some changes needed in the freebsd drivers for the SALSA
libs to work and don't worry it's nothing too difficult - mainly just
some bookeeping functions.




Best regards
Dev Mazumdar
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4Front Technologies
4035 Lafayette Place, Unit F, Culver City, CA 90232, USA.
Tel: (310) 202 8530		URL: www.opensound.com
Fax: (310) 202 0496 		Email: info at opensound.com
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