OSS Audio

blubee blubeeme gurenchan at gmail.com
Fri Dec 15 10:41:02 UTC 2017


On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 6:30 PM, 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.
>
> What about physical input jacks for mic and line in?
>   # cat /dev/sndstat
>   installed devices
>   pcm0: <Realtek ALC887 (Rear Analog)> (play/rec) default
>   pcm1: <Realtek ALC887 (Front Analog)> (play/rec)
>   pcm2: <Realtek ALC887 (Onboard Digital)> (play)
>   pcm3: <Realtek ALC887 (Rear Digital)> (play)
>   pcm4: <ATI R6xx (HDMI)> (play)
> One cluster of physical inputs/outputs can be chosen, but using more than
> one set of inputs isn't always necessary.
>
> There are different implementations of OSS, because it has been often
> forked or added into various projects, including under less permissive
> licenses, still under the OSS name, to many times become cluttered. This is
> common for a project of a permissive license to be taken in by various
> projects, such as ALSA, that use GPL or even proprietary licenses. Most
> forked OSS versions are made to suit or work under other sound
> architectures, applications or an OS's purposes, not necessarily making
> them better. I realize that FreeBSD's version of OSS is not depreciated, is
> fairly efficient, and is functional as it is what FreeBSD uses as
> /dev/sndstat. For the sound frontend, it depends on what the port/program
> has available from OSS, SNDIO or portaudio, to play on FreeBSD's OSS
> backend.
>
> I have a laptop with onboard stuff:
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Realtek ALC899 (Analog)> (play/rec) default
pcm1: <Realtek ALC899 (Rear Analog Line-out)> (play)
pcm2: <Realtek ALC899 (Rear Digital)> (play)
No devices installed from userspace.

The issue is FreeBSD doesn't have a lot of devs and instead of bringing
what FreeBSD has inline with upstream, it seems like they want to say nope,
just gonna keep on using our half forked version.

>
> > blubee blubeeme gurenchan at gmail.com - Fri Dec 15 07:49:28 UTC 2017
>
> >> If I can provide OSS audio/midi input and output for the tools that I
> use,
> >> then I can do all the routing natively with OSS.
>
> > There's nothing in FreeBSD that makes the sound architecture only
> support 1 audio device.
>

This 1 audio device thing hasn't been true for a very long time. It's
things like these that go unchallenged and cause confusion.

> These were issues with earlier versions of OSS implementation; please
> remember the days of rebooting your system to get new devices to show up.
>
> > All those issues have been sorted out in OSS 4.0 and above.
>
> > OSS API is like working with file descriptors;
>
> > The open() system call
> > The close() system call
> > The read() system call
> > The write() system call
> > The ioctl() system call
> > The select() and poll() system calls
> > The mmap() system call
>
>
> > Jack audio is NOT necessary, I already ported amsynth over to FreeBSD,
> they had a very old implementation of OSS backend for midi that just worked
> with my midi keyboard.
> > I spoke to the developer and he also updated his code to the newest
> version of OSS, here's some code: https://github.com/
> amsynth/amsynth/commit/7171bd4d945c5938442b80f4276b7e096f06a3a0#diff-
> 0b31b8315cadf5e7556f54a245817f90[https://github.com/amsynth/
> amsynth/commit/7171bd4d945c5938442b80f4276b7e096f06a3a0#diff-
> 0b31b8315cadf5e7556f54a245817f90]
>
> > There's a lot of misinfo out there about OSS being depreciated or dead,
> that's not the case.
> > From looking at what's available OSS is one of the most straight forward
> and stable Audio API's out there.
>
> > If you want to test for yourself, install audio/oss then run osstest and
> report back.
>
> > There's ALSA plugins for OSS that would provide better audio vs the way
> things are implemented right now.
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-ports at freebsd.org mailing list
> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>


More information about the freebsd-ports mailing list