ALSA vs. OSS vs. OSSFree

scenic writes "I was wondering what experience the /. community has had with ALSA vs the sound drivers that are part of the Kernel and the various other choices (such as the 4Front OSS packages). I've used the commercial OSS drivers as well as the "included" Linux drivers. I've started to look to ALSA for better sound response (for example, I've noticed with esd and the basic linux drivers, there is sometimes a lag when playing back video files through esd. I understand that esd is part of the issue, but it's sort of important to be able to multiplex sound). What have others' experiences been? What other solutions are there aside from things like esd?" Which sound systems do you find work for your system, and which don't? If specific hardware / software combinations can be endorsed or critiqued, it'll probably help a lot of people.

Comments

Read "Programming Linux Games"...

[wrinkledshirt]

John Hurt does an interesting breakdown of six different methods of programming sound for games, and talks about the advantages and disadvantages of each (not just the programming part).

According to him OSS is a pretty entrenched technology, but ALSA's continuing to grow. The fact that ALSA's retaining nearly 100% compatibility with OSS probably means that at some point you'll be able to make a full shift from OSS to ALSA...

Don't know if that's helpful (or even relevent).

Vote for ALSA

[spuk]

ALSA seems to have a better design and general quality. My (crappy) onboard ESS Solo 1 barely works (only pcm playback, didn't even record, the last time I checked) with the kernel driver, and its alsa driver supports (almost?) all the features, including 3D effects and all the in/out channels.

Program using the OSS/Free API for now

[salimma]

As has been mentioned, ALSA has OSS compatibility, and even better, automatically multiplex audio streams for you. Yes, you can play multiple sound files at the same time without a sound server.

Kind of like the jump from Win9x to Win2k, soundwise.

HTH,

Michel

ALSA 0.9.0 betas are frustrating

[Redline]

While the latest ALSA drivers sound wonderful on my SB Live, I have a non-technical problem with them.

I have tried to build several programs and libraries that have "native" ALSA support, and ALSA gets detected properly at configure-time. Then I proceed to make, and the build will die because the app only supports the 0.5.0 ALSA interface, and not 0.9.0. It is not really the fault of the ALSA drivers, the configure scripts (and ideally the software package itself) need updating to be aware of the newer ALSA interface.

I just feel like I am losing functionality when I have to reconfigure the software with "--disable-alsa" and let the OSS emulation layer get used. <sigh> I wish I had more time to hack on my favorite projects. ALSA 0.9 for everyone!

Re:What I want to know is...

[gid]

As mentioned above, yes ALSA supports hardware mixing. When you have the ALSA drivers running, and one of the magical sound cards, then more than one program can essentially use /dev/dsp at once. I've been digging for about 30 minutes now and still can't find a list of cards that support hardware mixing. So here's the cards that I KNOW support hardware mixing:

ymf724 pci based cards

ymf744 pci based cards, it's essentially a ymf724 but it has digital out, and 4 channel out

SB Live

Trident 4DWave

I own two ymf724's and a ymf744, great cards, they sound great, and they're cheap :) The ymf744and ymf724 have issues with quake3, it hangs on exit :( But you can just kill off the process luckily. This is with the latest .9.0beta7 drivers, the .5.x drivers don't have any noticeable issues though.

A quick search here's the cards: ymf744 [$18] and ymf744 pro version (digital out version?) [$25]