[gentoo-user] Re: Problem with sound card

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 10/25/2011 08:11 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Nikos Chantziaras<realnc@arcor.de>  wrote:
>> On 10/25/2011 07:17 PM, Michael Mol wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Mark Knecht<markknecht@gmail.com>
>>>   wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Paul Hartman
>>>>>
>>>>> Or that commercial linux sound driver package... I don't even remember
>>>>> what it was called anymore.
>>>>
>>>> OSS I think - something like Open Sound System or some such other
>>>> crazy thing, being it was neither Open nor most of the time for me
>>>> produced Sound on my System. ;-)
>>>>
>>>> I think there is still support for it in the kernel. Go figure...
>>>
>>> It's only been deprecated for over a decade...I can only barely
>>> remember a time before ALSA was pulled into the mainline kernel.
>>
>> OSS is the standard sound system for Unix still to this day though.
>> Everybody uses it, except Linux.
>>
>> It's GPL by the way.  I actually use it on my main PC ;-)  On supported
>> sound cards, it works much better than ALSA.  Not the version in the kernel,
>> of course, that one is deprecated.  The newest version is v4 and is only
>> available out-of-kernel.
>
> I imagine that it's support for the cards it supported in that time
> period was probably better than ALSA. I came to Linux looking for a
> platform to replace Windows to support Avid's ProTools. As I soon
> learned that wasn't going to happen, at least not soon, and it hasn't
> changed in the 10-15 years I've been using Linux. However in those
> days my need for ALSA was driven by OSS not supporting any sound card
> hardware that was of interest to people recording music. ALSA was at
> least trying, and has gotten much better over the years with things
> like Jack and rt-sources which easily outperforms Windows in terms of
> latency.

That's true.  Though I judge by desktop needs on my machine.  The lack 
of a per-application volume mixer in ALSA is really frustrating.  And if 
you bark about it, you're told to install PulseAudio, which is another 
can of worms entirely :-/  I guess I'm gonna be using OSSv4 for as long 
as that old Soundblaster Live I have here refuses to die.