23 Sep
2003
23 Sep
'03
3:46 p.m.
The coolest thing about OSS for me was when I finally realized that all
I had to do was open a file (/dev/dsp), read from it and write to it to
capture sound and play it back. I made a stupid little 'feedback'
application in about 10 lines of code.
Figuring that out took a while. I just knew it had to be harder than
that!
Coming from the Windows and Mac world, where you have to work with some
sort of audio subsystem to do that kind of thing, this design was pretty
exciting and seemed almost ingenious.
It sounds like Jack is a system to learn like on Windows/Mac. ALSA can
be such a system, or you can use its OSS emulation mode and do audio as
described above through the file system.
That said, it doesn't take long to grow out of the simple file i/o
method. Pretty soon you have to learn OSSs hidden language --- of ioctls
called in just the right order and so on --- at which point you are
probably better off with a fuller featured, future looking and better
supported open source system.
- mo