[linux-audio-dev] OSS will be back

[Loki Davison]

On 11/3/06, Josef Jurek <jurek at cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> Hannu Savolainen <hannu at opensound.com> writes:
> >
> [...]
>
> > The whole "OSS is depracated" issue is just  marketing propaganda used
> > to enforce application developers to jump to the ALSA API. Without this
> > developers would stick with OSS which is several magnitudes easier API
> > to use.
>
> "Marketing propaganda?"  4Front Technologies is a company that
> engages in the sale of software for profit.  4Front Technologies therefore
> requires and presumably has a "market", people who pay them for their
> products.  I don't think the same situation exists for those
> who develop ALSA.
>
>
> > OSS and ALSA are very different APIs. OSS is designed for professional
> > software developers who should get their job done within tight
> > schedules. For this reason it has strong device abstraction. Everything
> > that could be automated has been automated. ALSA in turn is designed for
> > hackers (in the 1st place) who like to tweak every possible detail of
> > the hardware. This means there is practically no device abstraction and
> > the application should be more or less aware of the capabilities of the
> > hardware. Which API works better depends on the nature of the
> > application. This decision should not be driven by some political issues
> > as today.
>
> So you say:
>
>   OSS:  professional software developers
>   ALSA: hackers
>

mmm. I think they are missing the point about ALSA vs OSS api here. It
doesn't matter. The only one who should care about alsa vs oss is the
jack guys who write the jack backend. Everyone else uses the clear,
nice, well implemented, well documented modern and sensible jack api
instead of some very 80's style pipe based system.

Have you tried OSS for midi? ARRG horrible flashbacks. Any app using
oss for midi is automatically classed as useless by me. Good bye
timing, good by flexibility hello dodgyness!

Portability wise how is OSS better than jack? Jack runs on posix
systems (mac, linux, etc) and there seems to be action on the windoze
front. OSS for portability is silly, everyone gets screwed over in the
features department for really no uses to get anything out of it. How
do you record the output of an OSS app nicely? Route it to
timemachine... i don't think so. Look at the example jack apps. So
easy!

Loki