Csound Csound-dev Csound-tekno Search About

OT: OSS vs ALSA

Date1999-08-19 07:38
Frompete moss
SubjectOT: OSS vs ALSA
can someone tell me the merits of alsa in relation to oss for linux?  i
have oss working fine, but i am considering doing a switch to alsa. 
will alsa work with progs that need oss?

Date1999-08-19 15:34
FromKevin Conder
SubjectRe: OT: OSS vs ALSA
On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, pete moss wrote:

> can someone tell me the merits of alsa in relation to oss for linux?  i
> have oss working fine, but i am considering doing a switch to alsa. 
> will alsa work with progs that need oss?

	When all else fails, read the documentation: :-)
	http://www.alsa-project.org/~jfulmer/alsa-faq.html

	The main advantage of using ALSA over OSS/Free (the default sound
system in most Linux distributions) is full duplex support.  There are
other reasons, even the commercial OSS guys admit the ALSA API has better
MIDI support.  

	The ALSA project FAQ says that it will "maintain backwards 
compatibility with most OSS applications".  The FAQ mentions a few OSS
program that have problems.  Linux CSound has support for ALSA sound
drivers so that shouldn't be an issue.

	For Linux CSound:
	http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_csound.html

===================================================================
Kevin Conder, email: kconder@interaccess.com
Web site: http://homepage.interaccess.com/~kconder