Re: Native sound system

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

> Wednesday, April 04, 2018 at 6:32 AM; "Benny Siegert"

> Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 6:28 AM Sid wrote:
> > OSS version 4 from http://developer.opensound.com/ is supposed to allow
> multiple sound applications to play simultaneously, and it has improvements
> over previous and forked versions. For the most part, it has a BSD license.
>
> NetBSD has an in-kernel audio mixer that allows multiple audio sources to
> play at the same time. I think it might only be in 8-BETA or -current
> though.0

NetBSD current should jump to or try OSS version 4, to avoid redoing a lot of work.

> > There is also sndio, http://www.sndio.org/, from OpenBSD, which can
> handle MIDI frontends to a sound server (or directly to the hardware).
>
> Are people still using MIDI?

MIDI is still used for plugging in musical instrument output to the computer. Otherwise JACK, which is powerful but has many criticisms, is used. There is also limiting MIDI input to usb devices, which is inconvenient and not suitable.

> > Also, across all BSD's, there is not a simple drop-in BSD replacement of
> libcanberra, to act as an API from certain applications to OSS or sndio.
>
> But there is libcanberra itself? Also libao has a native "sunaudio" driver
> IIRC.

libcanberra seems to aim to complicate itself, and it mixes in bloated graphical gtk2 and gtk3 dependencies, which have nothing to do with sound output. Every attempt to un-complicate it, results in further tangling of it by developers or maintainers, at least when trying to sort through its makefile for another operating system. Is libao, as an API, capable of being part of a substitute?

There are many applications that output to gstreamer or libcanberra, that should have a simpler solution to go straight to OSS.