Re: Native sound system

[Sid <sid%bsdmail.com@localhost>]

> Thursday, April 05, 2018 at 2:24 AM, "Martin Husemann"
> libosssaudio.so is only a (tiny) compat shim on NetBSD (like 1000 lines of
> C code).
> 
> Adding newer OSS versions to that is more work, not less ;-)
> 
> But it certainly should be considered. We are currently at 0x030001.

Does anyone know how sndio from OpenBSD stacks up against 4Front's OSS v4? sndio is lightweight as well. I thought OSS version 4 was new as of last year, but it looks like it's been around longer. It also requires the proprietary drivers for some hardware (http://www.4front-tech.com/developer/sources/stable/bsd/oss-v4.2-build2017-src-bsd.txt), but being under a BSD license, open source drivers can be created, which means more work.

Both OSS and sndio are capable of interfacing hardware drivers or functioning as an API. Now I think we should look at the possibility of sndio for interfacing hardware, rather than OSS. I believe sndio can operate regular audio as well as MIDI.

> From Nathanial Sloss;
> NetBSD-8 features and in-kernel audio mixer with a sun audio/OSS compatible 
audio interface.

> Each instance of an open audio device provides a separate audio device to each 
> audio application/audio server with independent software volume for each 
> channel.

> This makes it possible to run portaudio, SDL audio apps, pulseaudio, esd, nas, 
> sun audio applications and OSS v4 applications, etc side by side.

> As for OSSv4 see:
> http://gnats.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=46611

> I imported the necessary ioctls into libossaudio for compatibility with oss v4 
> in 2014.  The exported oss version number is still lower than v4 as the mixer 
> control api is yet to be added.

So this is why only 1 device can play audio at once for most applications, while the hardware can already support multiple audio inputs.

> It makes it possible to use applications in package source that require oss v4 
> support and these addition of an oss v4 compatible api has been essential for 
> many packages for quite some time.

I don't know if OSS version 4 from 2017 is backwards compatible with other versions or forks of OSS. Perhaps it is.

> As for midi, These devices should be supported by midi(4).  There are 
> usb/spkr(4) attachments as well as midi ports found on older sound cards.

> Additionally there is also the pseudo audio device pad(4) which allows audio 
> to be captured to file or used in conjuction with the bluetooth a2dp streaming 
> daemon.

MIDI should already work as long as it has an API layer? (sndio works as such, not sure if the latest OSS does too)


Thanks to everyone who informed about MIDI's use in instruments and software. Sorry for repeating a another message, it delayed, then finally all of them went through (subscribing to the list should have fixed that).