2 Nov
2006
2 Nov
'06
10:42 p.m.
On 11/3/06, Josef Jurek <jurek(a)cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:
Hannu Savolainen <hannu(a)opensound.com> writes:
[...]
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
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