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#26 2008-03-16 15:22:54

Cotton
Member
From: Cornwall, UK
Registered: 2004-09-17
Posts: 568

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

The primary reason for me trying OSS4 was that alsa's dmix doesn't work on my hardware.  OSS4 offered software mixing with independent control over individual applications sound levels, which it did successfully.  Personally, audio quality was comparable with alsa, although clicks were heard in some applications, which may (or may not) have been interrupt related.

However, the mixer interface (ossxmix) left alot to be desired, which is surprising considering its commercial background.  Although, this is likely to be improved in 4.1, I was unable to succeed in creating a suitable pkgbuild for the beta version to try it.  The other downsides described in the OP were enough for me to re-install alsa.

I'm sure the project will develop further and improve but currently I would imagine people with above "average audio" requirements will probably obtain the necessary hardware to meet their needs using existing software.  Unfortunately, until installation becomes "fire and forget", people will be reluctant to risk breaking their audio - there are enough sound related problems on the forums as it is already.

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#27 2008-03-17 00:15:55

SpookyET
Member
Registered: 2008-01-27
Posts: 410

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Sound does not work in KDE4 at all. While Phonon is based on Xine, which has OSS support, it queries HAL, which does not support OSS4 yet. Therefore, it thinks that there is no sound card.

As for KDE 3.5.9. Amarok works, Noatun works, and anything based on MPlayer should work.

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#28 2008-03-18 05:33:34

eric
Member
From: under heaven
Registered: 2004-02-11
Posts: 117

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

I didn't have any problem with ALSA, but I was interested in the better sound quality and the more efficient memory and CPU consumption of OSS4.

I don't know how to measure the memory and CPU usage of OSS4 and ALSA, if someone can confirm that OSS4 is more efficient (or not), I would be happy, because I like my system to be memory and CPU efficient.
I do notice that the sound in OSS4 is louder, but I'm not sure if the sound is also better. I'm still testing this, but it's not easy to test, because I have to switch between OSS4 and ALSA and reboot the system.

Installing OSS4 on my system was not as easy as installing ALSA: flash movies on konqueror (and probably other browsers as well) will not have sound. This issue is solved by building an extra library. But there is one more issue left that may make me choose ALSA: recording through the microphone in Virtualbox (running a Windows XP guest) is not working. Using ALSA instead of OSS4 will make recording through the microphone work in Virtualbox again. Recording through the microphone always works on Archlinux, no matter which sound system is used.

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#29 2008-04-09 13:43:17

Rasi
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From: Germany
Registered: 2007-08-14
Posts: 1,914
Website

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

i can tell you that mpd using alsa uses 12% cpu on my system.. using oss4 it uses 1%... i seem to be one of some rare poor guys, but anyway, that was reason enough to change...

Now i only wish someone points me to the right direction to use this thing with pulseaudio sad


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#30 2008-04-09 15:02:23

brebs
Member
Registered: 2007-04-03
Posts: 3,742

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Rasi wrote:

mpd using alsa uses 12% cpu

Sounds like you're using samplerate_best. Which is the slowest converter, when converting between 44,100 and 48,000.

defaults.pcm.rate_converter "samplerate_best"

Pulseaudio is still immature. Doesn't seem able to handle surround sound yet.

The only way to completely avoid the Linux software-mixing mess, is to get a hardware-mixing soundcard.

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#31 2008-04-10 08:24:18

anykey
Member
From: Trier, Germany
Registered: 2004-06-12
Posts: 79

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

brebs wrote:

The only way to completely avoid the Linux software-mixing mess, is to get a hardware-mixing soundcard.

Which is precisely why I still have, still recommend and still buy old SB Live! cards, which do have EMU10K1 chips. They can hardware-mix just fine, and the drivers are tried and true.

Audiophiles might argue that the chipset is outdated and produces "bad" audio -- I am satisfied, and EMU10K1s are being sold at ebay for around 10 Euros and sometimes even less.

Though I wonder what I might be doing if PCI support is capped one day.

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#32 2008-04-11 02:27:27

jb
Member
From: Florida
Registered: 2006-06-22
Posts: 466

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

anykey wrote:

Though I wonder what I might be doing if PCI support is capped one day.

Supposedly, the Asus Xonar driver is nearing completion.


...

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#33 2008-04-11 07:12:45

anykey
Member
From: Trier, Germany
Registered: 2004-06-12
Posts: 79

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Does the Xonar feature hardware mixing? It does not look that way. (Believe it or not, but most of my customers want to use Teamspeak with some Blizzard game, and it uses OSS interface only -- results in a mess with aoss/artsdsp/... and/or the real oss drivers; the EMU10K1 can do it just out of the box, no messing required)

Anyway, this is a very pricey card IMO. 150 Dollars is money I am not willing to spend on a sound card. Audiophiles might, yet again, disagree.

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#34 2008-04-11 11:18:36

Rumor
Member
From: Albany, NY
Registered: 2006-07-07
Posts: 638

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

anykey wrote:

(Believe it or not, but most of my customers want to use Teamspeak with some Blizzard game, and it uses OSS interface only -- results in a mess with aoss/artsdsp/... and/or the real oss drivers; the EMU10K1 can do it just out of the box, no messing required)

Anyway, this is a very pricey card IMO. 150 Dollars is money I am not willing to spend on a sound card.

I use M-Audio's Revolution 5.1 card. I've played Enemy Territory: Quake Wars while using TeamSpeak with this card. I have to launch TS using the aoss /path/to/TS command, but ti works fine. The commercial version of OSS has a driver written specifically for the chipset.

Anyway, if you're needing a less expensive TS capable card, you can get the Revolution 5.1 for around $60 at Newegg.


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#35 2008-04-12 00:13:59

SpookyET
Member
Registered: 2008-01-27
Posts: 410

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Rumor wrote:
anykey wrote:

(Believe it or not, but most of my customers want to use Teamspeak with some Blizzard game, and it uses OSS interface only -- results in a mess with aoss/artsdsp/... and/or the real oss drivers; the EMU10K1 can do it just out of the box, no messing required)

Anyway, this is a very pricey card IMO. 150 Dollars is money I am not willing to spend on a sound card.

I use M-Audio's Revolution 5.1 card. I've played Enemy Territory: Quake Wars while using TeamSpeak with this card. I have to launch TS using the aoss /path/to/TS command, but ti works fine. The commercial version of OSS has a driver written specifically for the chipset.

Anyway, if you're needing a less expensive TS capable card, you can get the Revolution 5.1 for around $60 at Newegg.

As I have said, there is no more commercial version.

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#36 2008-11-14 00:42:42

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

*bump*

after years of detesting alsa (and recently pulseaudio even more) i'm so happy with oss4; simple and flawless installation (for me), audibly better sound quality than alsa, hassle-free multichannel output, low cpu usage etc. etc.

i'm not going back, preferrably. wink


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#37 2008-11-16 00:23:26

Redroar
Member
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 200

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Agreed. OSS4.1 is a phenomenally easy to use and capable sound system.

ALSA was never a huge issue for me...it did OK with ALSA apps, though I felt it's OSS emulation was quite poor.

In general, it seems, most apps that have ALSA support also have OSS support, a number of proprietary programs only have OSS support and NO ALSA support, and the relatively few ALSA-only apps seem to work quite well with the ALSA emulation available.

Vmix is IMHO much better than Dmix, at least on my CA0106 card.

And by my own testing, OSS used less than .1% of my CPU per stream according to Htop (Athlon64 3800+ Single core). ALSA + Dmix would typically use about .5-1% per stream of audio, and PulseAudio would use a grotesque 2-4% per stream.

UPDATE: I messed around with the quality settings in ossxmix a little. At 'fast' it uses almost no discernible amount of CPU, maybe somewhere around .05% per stream. At 'medium' it uses about .2-.3% per stream. At 'high' it's about .5% per stream. At 'production' it is about 1% per stream. Keep in mind that at 'fast' the quality of mixing was clearer, and individual details easier to hear, than ALSA + Dmix or Pulse. I think that my sound card is too poor to tell the difference between anything beyond 'fast' OSS. Perhaps a slight benefit at 'high,' but again, this is not great equipment.

I remember the "great war," but at this point it would seem to be downright petty to deny that OSS is a mature, and in many cases superior, sound system for Linux. On my system, the high points were:

-Better sound
-Lower resource usage
-NO INITIAL CONFIG (It Just Worked (TM))
-Ossxmix seems pretty nice, at least for me.

Now, having said all this, I know that some people have had unsolvable issues with OSS4.1, or clicking or somesuch. But, personally, I think it should replace ALSA. If all the people working on ALSA turned their attention to OSS, I think that it could become a sound standard to be envied, rather than one that is viewed with skepticism, if not derision (I know several people who loathe ALSA).

PulseAudio has a place in this world. As a network sound server, not as a local sound mixer. I think it uses far too much in the way of resources and configuration to justify it's inclusion on a typical desktop system, and am somewhat disappointed to see it included by default on the 'newbie' distros. Not that it affects me, using Arch.

Disclaimer: I don't think ALSA is bad. I think OSS4 is better.

Last edited by Redroar (2008-11-16 02:42:15)


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#38 2008-11-16 00:31:07

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Redroar wrote:

... Now, having said all this, I know that some people have had unsolvable issues with OSS4.1, or clicking or somesuch. But, personally, I think it should replace ALSA. If all the people working on ALSA turned their attention to OSS, I think that it could become a sound standard to be envied, rather than one that is viewed with skepticism, if not derision (I know several people who loathe ALSA)...

On my system I found that the cure for the clicking is to simply drop the levels of the output of the program. Basically the signal was in the red, I brought it down, and the clicking went away.

The only unresolved problem that I'm having with OSS is the USB microphone on my camera isn't working. I'm not absolutely sure that it's not a configuration issue though; OSS does in fact see it.

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#39 2008-11-16 10:24:03

andre.ramaciotti
Member
From: Brazil
Registered: 2007-04-06
Posts: 649

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

I'd like to test OSS4, but it has no support for my soundcard. According to their website, it's supported on FreeBSD, but it doesn't help, because I only use Linux.

(It's an ESS ES1988 Allegro-1)


(lambda ())

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#40 2008-11-16 12:24:06

Army
Member
Registered: 2007-12-07
Posts: 1,784

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

I really start hating sound on linux! At university I have to use a program called pure data, which has to work together with audacity. So I tried it out with alsa and goddamn, it doesn't work. Me asking myself, why the f*** does it not work? So I switched to oss4 and everything was perfect! I really love it and I really never wanted to uninstall it again. But I had to, because I also want to do some audio production on my machine, but jack doesn't seem to like oss4, same with ardour. My USB soundcard (currently Edirol UA25) doesn't seem to work with oss4 as well. And I would love to continue using my tv card, which doesn't work with oss4 as well.

I really love oss4 and I wish alsa would have never come to life!

All this stuff makes me want to buy an apple computer and have a dual boot, Linux for every day's work with oss4 and OSX for audio stuff. Remains the tv card wink

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#41 2008-11-16 12:41:43

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

A bit of advice for those stuck with ALSA: some manual configuration is sometimes required. For example, on Acer laptops, putting

options snd-hda-intel model=acer

in modprobe.conf may result in significant improvements in sound quality (it did on mine).

Having seen the sound situation on FreeBSD, I do think that OSS has the advantage, but I don't think ALSA is really all that terrible.

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#42 2008-11-16 14:23:14

farvardin
Member
Registered: 2008-09-03
Posts: 120
Website

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

I've installed OSS in replacement to ALSA, and it seems to be good. It could even make my atari st emulator working again with sound.

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#43 2008-11-16 15:07:50

NoOneImportant
Member
From: Deep Southern California
Registered: 2007-02-13
Posts: 178

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

I wish I could use ladspa dsp's with OSS4

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#44 2008-11-16 15:15:34

Ashren
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 2007-06-13
Posts: 1,229
Website

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

OSS4 works fine with my Audigy card, but the tvcard module cx88 complains during boot:

cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_new1
cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_card_new
cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_boolean_mono_info
cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_lib_ioctl
cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_hw_constraint_pow2
cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_set_ops
cx88_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_period_elapsed

It seems to work anyway. Is it possible to compile the cx88 module for OSS instead of Alsa?

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#45 2008-11-16 15:26:16

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Redroar wrote:

PulseAudio has a place in this world. As a network sound server, not as a local sound mixer.

Very true and definitely not often enough said. PulseAudio on the desktop is like building a nuclear plant in your garden to charge your cellphone. K-i-s-s. wink


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#46 2008-11-16 18:03:52

shazeal
Member
From: New Zealand
Registered: 2007-06-05
Posts: 341

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Alsa is completely broken for my Audigy 2 ZS in 2.6.28, funny thing is... its not alsa's fault, because OSSv4 is also broken in 2.6.28 for it. Both work fine in 2.6.27. 2.6.28 has some "fixes" for spidif stuff which seemingly breaks everything else.
I am using my onboard ICH7 chip (until the audigy fix gets fixed), under alsa it works ok, OSSv4 refuses to work in any form with kmix on kde4, I even went as far as recompiling kdemultimedia with the OSSv4 soundcards.h replacing the system one.

So for me sound in Linux is pretty fubar at the moment roll

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#47 2008-11-17 00:11:13

Rasi
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2007-08-14
Posts: 1,914
Website

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

posted it just now in the oss/alsa/jack/pulseaudio thread... but it seems that oss4 is dead sad

http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/


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#48 2008-11-17 00:40:43

MindTooth
Member
From: Norway
Registered: 2008-11-11
Posts: 331

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

If OSS is that all good. Why does it goes that far, that the author choose to quit?

Birger smile

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#49 2008-11-17 01:48:27

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

MindTooth wrote:

If OSS is that all good. Why does it goes that far, that the author choose to quit?

Birger smile

Huge numbers of open source projects are commercial. People need to make money somehow, and something like this has to be very time consuming.

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#50 2008-11-17 04:33:02

shazeal
Member
From: New Zealand
Registered: 2007-06-05
Posts: 341

Re: The Sorry State of Sound In Linux

Yeah he just picked possibly the worst thing to go commercial with, i mean drivers. Was probably ok when only creative labs was making sound cards, then you could gouge anyone who had a creative card and wanted to use linux. Making it OSS was just a last ditch by him. Commercializing drivers is just plain dumb, to me anyone who came up with the idea to do just that is only in it for the money and does not really deserve sympathy. Its business.

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