aztcg7
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DROD blocks my sound card under Linux, but only when I don't already have some sort of sound going. From what I can tell, DROD blocks the card using OSS unless it can't get that, in which case it uses ALSA. Is it possible to set some sort of configuration so that it always uses ALSA?

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schep
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(Based on ftp://ptah.lnf.kth.se/pub/misc/sdl-env-vars)
Try putting SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa in the environment. If that does what you want, you can edit or copy the sh script that starts DROD.

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[Last edited by schep at 08-01-2007 12:31 PM]

jamie
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Is this why Linux switched to Alsa, because they couldn't fix OSS?

There's no reason why OSS couldn't allow multiple opens and auto-mix the sources!

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[Last edited by jamie at 08-04-2007 08:37 PM]

AlefBet
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jamie wrote:
Is this why Linux switched to Alsa, because they couldn't fix OSS?

I heard that they switched because the guy who developed OSS started a company and made subsequent versions proprietary. I think he has also subsequently released some FOSS OSS releases (man, that's an unfortunate acronym in the FOSS community .)

There's no reason why OSS couldn't allow multiple opens and auto-mix the sources!

Yeah, I think Linux stopped including OSS updates sometime before it started getting multi channel mixing capabilities. But I thought that when you used the OSS-ALSA compat layer, it would mix with other ALSA sources, just not other OSS sources.

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jamie
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Ahhh, thanks for the reply.

Yeah, the official version did go closed source, but the FreeBSD 'free' open-source OSS ( ) that is part of the FreeBSD distribution has had multi-channel mixing for as long as I can remember.

And yeah, they did start to release the binary blob of the official OSS for free, and as you suggest, they recently open-sourced the whole lot.. I wouldn't be surprised if ALSA was the motivation behind that!

Still, it's a shame, we don't need yet-another-audio-system - especially one from those people who don't like proprietary stuff, yet released things with 'linux' in the title ;-)

http://www.opensound.com/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

4FRONT TECHNOLOGIES RELEASES THE SOURCE CODE FOR OPEN SOUND SYSTEM

CULVER CITY, CA, June 14, 2007: 4Front Technologies is proud to announce the release of the source code to Open Sound System (OSS) v4.0. The software currently runs on Linux, Solaris., SCO UnixWare. and FreeBSD platforms.

OSS is a cross platform API that provides drivers for most consumer and professional audio devices for UNIX® and POSIX based operating systems, including Linux. Owing to its open architecture, applications developed on one supporting operating system platform can be easily recompiled on any other
platform.

Licensing Models:

Open Sound System is now available under 3 licenses:

o GNU Public License (GPL) version 2

o Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) for all operating systems that have full source code available under the BSD or CDDL licenses.

o 4Front.s commercial license for using Open Sound incompatible with open source licenses listed above. Commercial licenses are also available for entities not wishing to use Open Sound System under any of the above open source licenses

Creative labs wrote:

"With a long history of successful collaboration with 4Front, Creative looks forward to working with the Open Sound System community in ensuring that Creative Sound Blaster Live! and Sound Blaster Audigy sound cards have stable and well-supported drivers on Linux, Solaris and BSD. The open source release of Open Sound certainly helps our goal in providing cross-platform support for our products," said George Thorn, director of digital media relations for Creative Labs.

... so it will be interesting to see what now happens to ALSA - Linux people scream 'cross-platform' but all seem to now say "no!, use alsa!" -- well, the 'cross-platform' driver is OSS, boys!

More: http://www.opensound.com/press/2007/oss-gpl-cddl.txt

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[Last edited by jamie at 08-05-2007 11:17 PM]

trick
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Yeah, OSS emulation under ALSA is pretty broken in my opinion. Unless you run everything that use OSS through aoss it doesn't even use dmix (software mixing) at all, so people without hardware-mixing sound cards (which in Linux means anything not made by Creative) run into this problem all the time. Anyone know why this is even necessary? Why couldn't the ALSA guys just make a real OSS-to-ALSA pass-through driver in stead of having to mess with preloading library-overriding hacks?

Anyways, I was under the impression that SDL used ALSA by default under Linux (I currently consider this the preferred choice due to the software-mixing/blockage issues). As schep said, setting the SDL_AUDIODRIVER envvar to alsa is a work-around. Also, I'll try to I add some evil hacks to the DROD code to somewhat improve things.

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[Last edited by trick at 08-07-2007 04:31 PM]