Hey ryan,<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><a href="http://www.opensound.com/" target="_blank">http://www.opensound.com/</a><br>
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Then check out OSS4. It combines the a lower-level/low-latency/direct-access portions of ALSA (driver based) with the scheduling/sampling/mixing/per-application high-level interface of sound servers like PulseAudio - all *without* the overhead of a userspace sound server. The OSS 3+ API is also a supported sound system on the BSDs and Solaris which allows for Wine portability. Again, OSS is certainly not dead; OSS4 supports most modern sound hardware and exposes their features without the need for janky, problematic sound servers. Using OSS4 on a modern distribution and killing PulseAudio allows modern hardware to work with Wine on Linux. PulseAudio simply doesn't work sometimes.<br>
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Once nicety (and problem) with PulseAudio is that applications support OSS or ALSA don't need to be rewritten or even recompiled. ALSA or older OSS3 applications simply make calls to their respective sound systems, which are caught by PA then sent back to ALSA-backed hardware. That layer of abstraction, particularly for the ALSA-PulseAudio-ALSA calls, adds overhead and latency. This is probably acceptable with most desktop applications like browsers or simple sound and video players, but kills sound performance where it counts, namely in Wine while attempting to run resource-intensive applications like games and professional sound apps.<br>
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A low-latency sound server like JACK (including ASIO applications in Wine) sitting directly on top of ALSA/OSS is much more desirable than PulseAudio support. This has all been debated before; until PulseAudio provides a low-latency server and/or allows a *reliable* way (pasuspender not included) to pass calls directly through to hardware, it's just not a viable option for Wine. -r<br>
</blockquote><div><br>Oh, i am familiar with OSS and their website. <br></div><div><br>In my own experience Jack/OSS isn't as desirable as jack/ALSA. I haven't used OSS lately in Linux, last time i did, it wasn't a glitch free experience... but i did have FreeBSD8.1 running with Jackd, semi recently. it didn't perform nearly as well as under linux ( even with the BSD kernel tuned up) I heavily use jackd in my studio on several machines. OSS is mainly a Unix thing these days. Not so much Linux. People use it occasionally when they need to hack something to work(usually a legacy app), but beyond that, OSS lost out to ALSA along time ago. Not to many apps written in Gnu/Linux for OSS these days...in particular not for OSS4 - it won't ever be adopted.<br>
<br>I also did state that i "jumped the gun on saying it is dead" and pointed out Unix - but it certainly will never become the defacto standard in Linux. that's not going to change.<br><br>Of course, PA isn't a viable option for wine, getting good glitch-free sound is important - something that PA can't provide. Pa doesn't provide good sound in VMware either. I actually just removed PA from Gnome3 today (which just came through as an update in Archlinux). I had to do it for the same reasons you mention above - I use wineASIO with Jack, and also FST too. i despise PA and have to remove it on any fresh install of Linux.<br>
<br>happy times.<br><br>jordan<br><br><br><br><br><br> <br></div></div>