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On 12/07/2009 03:24 PM, 7v5w7go9ub0o wrote: |
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> Nikos Chantziaras wrote: |
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>> You *might* want to look into OSS4 if your card is supported by it :P |
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>> It will require a rebuild of many packages though ("oss -alsa" in |
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>> make.conf) and it requires using non-portage packages from an overlay |
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>> and rebuilding your kernel with sound support completely disabled. |
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>> |
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>> For what it's worth, that's what I use for a quite some time now. |
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> |
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> Do you see any advantage(s) to using OSS4 over alsa? |
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> |
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> e.g. |
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> |
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> 1. less distortion and/or better quality? |
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My equipment is not good enough for me to notice OSS4's better mixing |
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quality (I have 50$ speakers :P). |
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> 2. more control over the sound (e.g. equalizers)? |
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It does not have equalizers. It does however provide per-application |
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volume levels. That is, the mixer application allows me to lower the |
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volume of "Amarok" for example while leaving all other apps alone. |
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Every mixed application by vmix (OSS4's "dmix") gets its own volume control. |
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> 3. others? |
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The most important for me is that it always does mixing and is fully |
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compatible with OSS (duh!). |
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The second most important is audio latency. ALSA on my system is too |
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slow (I can notice a delay between firing a shot and hearing the *bang* |
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in Doom 3 for example, or hitting a key and hearing a note in LMMS.) |
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A third is that OSS4 can be used together with ALSA's userspace lib, so |
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ALSA-only apps can be compatible with OSS4. But not all ALSA apps work |
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with this setup (one I found that doesn't is Firefox, see below). |
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> What about downsides? |
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A downside for me is that the HTML5 video/audio support in Firefox needs |
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ALSA; trying to watch an HTML5 Ogg Theora video with alsa-lib using OSS4 |
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results in a 5FPS video playback even though there's no CPU utilization. |
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(Note that Flash videos have no issues.) |
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Another downside is that mixer applications (for example those of Gnome |
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and KDE) do not support even a single feature of OSS4, so those mixers |
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tend to show a pretty spartan amount of controls. |
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Yet another downside is that installing it can be a pain, especially if |
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you have "-oss" in your make.conf; a big package rebuild is in order then. |
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> (I am presently using alsa, and intermittently have blocked sounds - |
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> guess it is due to how the app was written.) |
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This was the reason I used OSS4 a while back when it got open sourced. |
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I was lucky my card (SB Live 24-bit) was supported by it; OSS4's |
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hardware support list is shorter than ALSA's. |
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