Open Sound System

From Free net encyclopedia

The Open Sound System (OSS) is a portable sound interface available in 11 different Unix systems. It was created in 1992 by Hannu Savolainen of Finland.

Following the project's success, Savolainen started the company 4Front Technologies and made his improvements proprietary, which may have contributed indirectly to the creation of ALSA. The proprietary package, developed by 4Front, is available at http://www.opensound.com/. However, free systems like GNU/Linux and *BSD include their own free GPL/BSD implementations.

1 OSS Limitations
2 OSS in relation to ALSA
3 See also
4 External links

[edit]

OSS Limitations

The OSS API was designed at a time when soundcards were much more limited than today. This resulted in lack of API support for several features like:

Hardware MIDI support (usually implemented by wavetable synthesis)
Hardware mixing of multiple audio channels
Full duplex operation

Some of these features have been later implemented in OSS drivers, but the lack of an unified architecture makes the implementation of these features less elegant.

These limitations, particularly in Linux, inspired the original work that later became ALSA.

[edit]

OSS in relation to ALSA

In the case of the Linux kernel, OSS was the only supported sound system used up to the 2.4.x series. Starting with version 2.5, ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture was introduced, and the OSS interface became deprecated by Linux' authors. ALSA contains an optional OSS emulation mode that transparently appears to programs as if it was OSS.

ALSA is the recommended interface for software that is intended to work on Linux only. However, software that strives to be portable across other Unixes (including *BSD) typically use OSS instead (or support both).

[edit]