OSS Vs ALSA
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While I am a happy full time desktop Linux user, I am not really a Linux sound expert. Don’t get me wrong, I am passingly familiar with OSS, ALSA, aRTS, ESD. And the advantages of using JACK vs Pulse Audio. But this recent piece on OSS got me thinking - what is the attraction of OSS these days?
The argument that ALSA is not as good as OSS and this new rewrite of OSS described from the article linked above, has me baffled. Why avoid using ALSA, which as worked well for all this time.
Maybe back a few years ago we would considering giving OSS more acceptance, but even apps that once were heavily depending on OSS such as Skype and Audacity, appear to have moved on to ALSA. So even if there are scripts to make OSS work well with ALSA apps, is there really a point? If there is, I am totally open to anyone thoughts here.
One Comment
Austin
June 15th, 2009
at 11:14pm
I’ve experienced lots of troubles with programs wanting to use ALSA instead of OSS and vice versa including pulseaudio. One program is WINE. I can switch it’s audio output to OSS but it’ll lag behind a bit as it is mainly used for ALSA.