Re: Re: The obsolence of OSS, Was: big smile

[Jan Depner <eviltwin69@cableone.net>]

Boy, I hate to step into the middle of a good screaming match ;-) but it
sounds to me like you're comparing apples and oranges.  I run OSS at
work and ALSA at home.  At work I just want to listen to tunes and run a
few different sound apps so OSS is fine.  At home I'm doing multitrack
recording with pro gear so I *have* to have JACK/ALSA.  OSS doesn't
handle my DSP2000 very well.  In addition, almost all of the pro sound
apps are being written for JACK.  From a normal user's point of view OSS
is probably smoother/easier/better.  ALSA will eventually get there.  I
*do* think that the decision to include ALSA in the kernel is probably
the beginning of the end for OSS (sorry).

Jan



On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 05:20, Adam Tla/lka wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 10:54:58PM +0100, Benno Senoner wrote:
> > for those that are too lazy to browse the forums:
> > 
> > http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25
> > -----
> > .... 
> > far more advanced ???
> > Ok I'd like see Ardour runnnig with multiple 24bit cards, all the 
> > switches for hardware monitoring etc under OSS.
> nice but many people just haven't this hardware and want to use
> normal PCI sound cards or even matherboard build in codecs
> and mix many applications PCM sound together, use MIDI (software
> emulated or not) without need of special configuring of aplications.
> VirtualMixer, InputMultiplexer and SoftMidi in OSS does things transparently.
> Mixing is done in kernel space so there is no delays and clicks
> while some disk activity get processor as occurs in ALSA mixing in lib
> case. Test xmms with ALSA and dma plugin and try to open big tar.gz
> file. We got buffer underrun and app freezes. Sometimes I can only do
> kill -9 ;-). It depends on buffer and period sizes. Sometimes app
> freezes completly and sometimes you can rebufer by pressing pause/play
> buttons. Is it nice and accepted?? While useing java app under aoss
> it gopes to hell if buffer underrun occures.
> > 
> > How about MIDI ? Where is OSS' midi router, is there an ossconnect 
> > utility ? (of course this a sarcastic comment :) )
> > 
> should be done in the future ;-).
> > 
> > Only a fool would write a new linux audio app that does not use ALSA, 
> > especially apps that need MIDI.
> > Ok jackd will probably become the "audio interface" of choice, but jackd 
> > using ALSA is more powerful than in the OSS case,
> > (talking of pure PCM based apps, with PCM/MIDI apps the advantage is 
> > even more apparent).
> I don't know jackd in details but generally I don't want any additional 
> suid daemon running in realtime priority in my system. Maybe if we need 
> to pump sound streams through the net we need a daemon.
> But normally kernel should manage devices (real or emulated)
> so there is a consistent way of accessing and using them.
> I have many normal users which want to browse the net, display flash
> pages, java applets or use RealPlayer. All of them use OSS ;-).
>  
> > 
> > Not to mention that most distros once they will ship kernel 2.6 they 
> > will probably use ALSA as default because users
> > are demanding multimedia features like MIDI, support of highend cards, 
> OSS supports more cards then ALSA
> 
> > jackd support etc.
> works with OSS too
> 
> > So this will slowly but surely render OSS totally obsolete. I'm sorry 
> > but that's the truth that you cannot escape from.
> Maybe but now functionalty of ALSA and just ease of use is not
> so good to satisfy us. Mixing in lib is bad in my opinion and works nice
> only if we have enough free CPU cycles. But we use many applications at
> the same time compiling kernel, transfering data, looking in the
> archives, doing backups etc.
>  
> > Just like Micosoft's share on the desktop will drop considerably over 
> > time due to linux being more efficient and cheaper :-)
> Not so fast :-(!!
> 
> Regards
> 
> -- 
> Adam Tla/lka      mailto:atlka@pg.gda.pl    ^v^ ^v^ ^v^
> System  & Network Administration Group           ~~~~~~
> Computer Center,  Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
> PGP public key:   finger atlka@sunrise.pg.gda.pl
> 
> 
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