Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Problem with sound card

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.de> wrote:
> On 10/25/2011 07:17 PM, Michael Mol wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Mark Knecht<markknecht@×××××.com>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Paul Hartman
>>>>
>>>> Or that commercial linux sound driver package... I don't even remember
>>>> what it was called anymore.
>>>
>>> OSS I think - something like Open Sound System or some such other
>>> crazy thing, being it was neither Open nor most of the time for me
>>> produced Sound on my System. ;-)
>>>
>>> I think there is still support for it in the kernel. Go figure...
>>
>> It's only been deprecated for over a decade...I can only barely
>> remember a time before ALSA was pulled into the mainline kernel.
>
> OSS is the standard sound system for Unix still to this day though.
> Everybody uses it, except Linux.
>
> It's GPL by the way.  I actually use it on my main PC ;-)  On supported
> sound cards, it works much better than ALSA.  Not the version in the kernel,
> of course, that one is deprecated.  The newest version is v4 and is only
> available out-of-kernel.

I imagine that it's support for the cards it supported in that time
period was probably better than ALSA. I came to Linux looking for a
platform to replace Windows to support Avid's ProTools. As I soon
learned that wasn't going to happen, at least not soon, and it hasn't
changed in the 10-15 years I've been using Linux. However in those
days my need for ALSA was driven by OSS not supporting any sound card
hardware that was of interest to people recording music. ALSA was at
least trying, and has gotten much better over the years with things
like Jack and rt-sources which easily outperforms Windows in terms of
latency.

- Mark