FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

      		Open Sound System v3.9 BETA for NetBSD Released.

CULVER CITY, CA, July 23, 1998: 4Front Technologies is announcing the 
availability of the first public BETA release of  Open Sound System(TM)
(OSS) version 3.9 for NetBSD 1.3.2 for Intel x86 PCs.

OSS provides sound card drivers for most popular sound cards 
under NetBSD. These drivers support digital audio, MIDI, Synthesizers 
and mixers found on sound cards. These sound drivers comply with the 
Open Sound System API specification. 

OSS provides a user-friendly GUI which makes the installation of 
sound drivers and configuration of sound cards very simple! OSS 
supports over 200 brand name sound cards as well as sound chipsets found 
in laptops and motherboards with integrated audio. There is full support
for all PnP and PCI audio cards like Ensoniq AudioPCI, Creative PCI64 and
S3 Sonic Vibes PCI. On Creative Labs AWE series, there is support for the
EMU8000 wavetable synthesizer. OSS drivers support automatic sound card 
detection, Plug-n-Play support and support for full duplex audio. These
driver are Loadable Kernel Modules (LKM) which don't require any kernel
recompilation (except when you need to disable the older Voxware drivers).

4Front is also pleased to introduce some new and exciting audio technologies
for NetBSD:

1) SoftOSS:
SoftOSS provides a software based wave-table engine that can render MIDI
and MOD music files without requiring any special wave-table hardware. 
Any 16bit soundcard can now playback MIDI music via wave-table synthesis.

2) Virtual Mixer:
Virtual mixer provides real-time mixing of up to 8 stereo audio channels.
Now users can play up to 8 simultaneous audio applications. This allows
multiple audio apps to run at the same time without having a 
"Audio device not available because it's being used by another application"
type of situation. 

3) Wave Loop:
There are two new audio devices (master and slave). One of them is for
playback and the other for recording. Waveloop can be used to record
the audio data produced by an application such as a MP3 player or
Real Audio(TM) player. It's also possible to feed output of a playback
application like a MIDI/MOD/MP3 player into a capture application like
Real Audio Encoder and stream it directly on the web. 

Finally, OSS also supports the professional audio hardware like 
the SB AWE64/Gold (S/PDIF) and Zefiro Acoustics ZA2 cards which can be 
used with professional studio equipment and DAT players for recording 
and playing back multichannel audio.

For more information and to download a free 7 day evaluation version, 
visit 4Front's WWW site at http://www.opensound.com/netbsd.html

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All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
Open Sound System is a trademark of 4Front Technologies.
Copyright (C) 1996-1998, 4Front Technologies, All Rights Reserved.

Contact: Dev Mazumdar

4Front Technologies
4035 Lafayette Place, Unit F
Culver City, CA 90232
USA.

Tel: (310) 202 8530		E-mail: info@opensound.com
Fax: (310) 202 0486		Web: http://www.opensound.com