A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle [LWN.net]

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 25, 2008 20:10 UTC (Thu) by wertigon (guest, #42963)
Parent article: A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

OSS deprecated? WTF? OSS3, yes, but OSS4 definitely isn't.

The reason? It's spelled *BSD, Solaris and virtually *every other UNIX out there*. ALSA is *incompatible* with those, and trying to kill off OSS the way Linux is doing it will only lead to lots of extra pain for people trying to write things that works on the other UNIXes, sadly.

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A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Posted Sep 25, 2008 20:27 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Ya need to relax.

He said it's obsolete, not depreciated. There is a difference. In his opinion it's a awkward and difficult design and requires every application that supports it to have their own resampling mechanisms, among other things. "Obsolete", in this case, is politically correct codeword for "it sucks so don't use it".

Also he went out of his way to mention (since he mentions it multiple times) the fact that most of the libraries he was talking about have OSS support. Even Alsa libs can run on OSS and are quite possibly portable even though nobody is interested in making them run on anything other then Linux. In most every category mentioned he recommends NOT programming in Alsa except for very simple PCM playback and capture and low-level audio plumbing.

His recommendations:
Jack -- has OSS support
SDL -- has OSS support
libcanberra -- has OSS support
"Safe" ALSA -- has OSS backend
PulseAudio -- has OSS support