Re: Native sound system

[Nathanial Sloss <nat%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hi,

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 seperate 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.

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.

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.

I hope this helps,

Best regards,

Nat