Re: Moving from OSS to ALSA

[Lorn Potter <lpotter@trolltech.com>]

On Monday 12 January 2004 4:13 am, James Wright wrote:
>  I am currently looking into rewriting our current OSS sound routines to
> native ALSA, as it seems OSS will invariably be phased out now that the
> ALSA driver is distrubuted with the Linux kernel, plus ALSA seems to have a
> great number of benefits for us.

Personally, I hope OSS compat will never be phased out. Why? OSS is simple, 
and concise. If I am writing a simple audio recording/playing app, I can get 
the job done using OSS code in _much_ less lines of code.


_Dont get me wrong_, ALSA is great and a lot more powerful than OSS, but it is 
lacking a simple API. 
Ever try to write an In/Out volume control mixer in OSS? Ever try to port that 
same mixer to ALSA?  From what I can gather (alsa seems to be lacking mixer 
docs/tutorial) , the only way to change the mic input level (alsa), I have to 
enumerate over every mixer gizmo and check to see if its the mic, and then 
change it if I think it appears to be the Mic.

Using OSS, I can do that in one line.






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