OSS Audio

Sid sid at bsdmail.com
Sat Dec 16 06:18:47 UTC 2017


>> Sid; Fri Dec 15 23:05:47 UTC 2017
>> It's not that FreeBSD is limiting features, it is more that, OSS is a cluster of complexities,
>> when it is brought to FreeBSD, it is cleaned up, trimmed, and made efficient for this OS.

> blubee blubeeme; Sat Dec 16 01:40:13 UTC 2017
> This is where the issue lies, FreeBSD's oss "compatible" implementation did some things that went against the design of oss4 and re-introduced and will see that bad audio > programming habits are carried forward into the future.
> This makes it hard to find and fix the root cause of the problems but instead of doing that, people just keep on creating new audio infrastructure.
 
> Why?

"there are so many different OSS implementations, not all of them compatible. Even Linux before 2.4 had an OSS implementation until it got replaced with ALSA. Sndio is standardized, it's the same on all BSDs. Because it's the same for all BSDs it's easier for an application programmer to use it and not have to make dozens of exceptions in the code." https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/60852/

This is an answer, but I supposed that OSS being an unstandardized tangled cluster of code is not the answer you're looking for.

If http://opensound.com/ is the 4Front you're talking about, it is simply their oss license agreement, https://sourceforge.net/p/opensound/git/ci/master/tree/EULA, which is not compatible with a BSD or any opensource license, which is enough for FreeBSD not to include it in the base. Aside from it not being incompatible, FreeBSD would get sued for using it in their base, because that license says it can only be used by each person on one computer at a time, and can't be redistributed. As I've mentioned before, many projects took OSS, made it into their own, forked it and the licenses. They can take those forks, but once they change to a restrictive license, it can't come back here. Again, OSS has many implementations which are a cluster of tangled sourcecode and licenses.

If you need details on why developers made decisions on how they programmed it, or what they got from it, then they'll have to chime in.

Use sndio or portaudio for MIDI whenever available instead. In most cases, developers will have to install that frontend into music programs.


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