Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

aquila_deus · 2006-09-04 02:11:51

http://www.opensound.com/
I dumped oss2jack and installed oss/commercial back this morning; There is no longer any noise when special effects are on, and UT and mplayer work perfectly!

Why it's much better than alsa: · Built-in multi-sound mixer, up to 32 streams (/dev/dsp automatically redirects sound to /dev/dsp2 - /dev/dsp33)
· A system-wide Equalizer
· Reverb effects
· Fidelity Enhance
· 3D Surround Sound, great for Josh Groban's music!No AUR package yet. Just download & install, add /usr/lib/oss/bin to PATH, and run ossxmix to configure global volume or ossxmix -d1 to tweak special effects.

NOTES:
1.To load the sound driver automatically, put soundon >/dev/null 2>&1 & in /etc/rc.local; soundoff to unload the driver.
2.You can save mixer settings by running savemixer as root
3.Default multi-sound support is 8 streams, you can change it by running soundconf (when driver is unloaded), option softoss_devices
4.The license that comes with driver needs to be upgraded every 6 months (?), a bit inconvenient

Cheers!

Gullible Jones · 2006-09-04 03:20:05

It's been in the Wiki for a while, IIRC.

aquila_deus · 2006-09-04 04:45:45

Gullible Jones wrote:

It's been in the Wiki for a while, IIRC.

AH, but nobody put it in repository?? The driver is much better than alsa now

iphitus · 2006-09-04 07:11:06

Cept for the fact you have to reinstall it every 30 (?) days. And that it doesnt support all soundcards. And last time i tried it, it didnt support alsa, which left me in the funny position that some alsa based apps didnt work.

James.

aquila_deus · 2006-09-04 08:16:08

iphitus wrote:

Cept for the fact you have to reinstall it every 30 (?) days. And that it doesnt support all soundcards. And last time i tried it, it didnt support alsa, which left me in the funny position that some alsa based apps didnt work.
James.

The license says it will expire at the end of 2006 - not a problem to me since other packages update much more often .

It indeed supports less cards - the setup detects via8233a driver for my via8237; and no ALSA - but I dunno any alsa apps that don't support oss (linux-specific ones?)

Its software mixing is not bad compared to jackd (though not for short-time sound, need an esd/artsd running). And there is completely no matched F/OSS software to its 3D surround emulation and reverb effects that can work on system level.

tomk · 2006-09-04 08:46:27

If you ask me, it's a bit dishonest to call it the "Open Sound System", when all they're providing are compiled tarballs. They should also attempt to get the license renewal info correct - the home page says four months, the download page "up to" 6 months, the Readme in the tarball "about" 3 months, and the EULA does not mention any renewal requirement whatsoever.

Oh, and good luck creating the PKGBUILD - or at least, an Arch-compliant one. The install script is a binary, and requires user interaction.

After all that, though, if you're enjoying it, use it - it's your system.

aquila_deus · 2006-09-04 14:12:24

tomk wrote:

If you ask me, it's a bit dishonest to call it the "Open Sound System", when all they're providing are compiled tarballs. They should also attempt to get the license renewal info correct - the home page says four months, the download page "up to" 6 months, the Readme in the tarball "about" 3 months, and the EULA does not mention any renewal requirement whatsoever.

It's been changed several times after they made it free months ago, and there is no renewal requirement.

The "Open" has nothing to do with free or open-source - the name just means this software is an implementation of the OSS

test1000 · 2006-09-04 15:04:59

i think oss2jack would work with ET and quake if you didn't startup jackd with the -R realtime switch though.

Gullible Jones · 2006-09-04 15:40:46

Also...

* Built-in multi-sound mixer, up to 32 streams (/dev/dsp automatically redirects sound to /dev/dsp2 - /dev/dsp33)

ALSA has that.

* A system-wide Equalizer
* Reverb effects
* Fidelity Enhance

Alsa doesn't have those but you can get them from things running on top of ALSA.

* 3D Surround Sound, great for Josh Groban's music!

ALSA supports that.

aquila_deus · 2006-09-04 15:59:58

Gullible Jones wrote:

Also...
* Built-in multi-sound mixer, up to 32 streams (/dev/dsp automatically redirects sound to /dev/dsp2 - /dev/dsp33)
ALSA has that.

dmix is not counted. It causes bad noise when you play 2 or 3 music streams at the same time. You need oss2jack for a real mixer on ALSA.

Gullible Jones wrote:

* A system-wide Equalizer
* Reverb effects
* Fidelity Enhance
Alsa doesn't have those but you can get them from things running on top of ALSA.
* 3D Surround Sound, great for Josh Groban's music!
ALSA supports that.

Yes there are many plugins and it also gives you much more controls over the internals. But some apps still use the oss emulation and they may need tweak. Also there is no simple GUI to configure all of these.

So, why not use one software that solves most of the problems, without any hacking? It's free, after all.

tomk · 2006-09-04 17:02:45

aquila_deus wrote:

4.The license that comes with driver needs to be upgraded every 6 months

aquila_deus wrote:

there is no renewal requirement.

OK then .....

Gullible Jones · 2006-09-04 17:41:14

aquila_deus wrote:

Gullible Jones wrote:
Also...
* Built-in multi-sound mixer, up to 32 streams (/dev/dsp automatically redirects sound to /dev/dsp2 - /dev/dsp33)
ALSA has that.
dmix is not counted. It causes bad noise when you play 2 or 3 music streams at the same time. You need oss2jack for a real mixer on ALSA.

Really? I've seen that with aoss, but never with apps that actually use ALSA.

Gullible Jones wrote:

* A system-wide Equalizer
* Reverb effects
* Fidelity Enhance
Alsa doesn't have those but you can get them from things running on top of ALSA.
* 3D Surround Sound, great for Josh Groban's music!
ALSA supports that.

Yes there are many plugins and it also gives you much more controls over the internals. But some apps still use the oss emulation and they may need tweak. Also there is no simple GUI to configure all of these.

So, why not use one software that solves most of the problems, without any hacking? It's free, after all.

aquila_deus · 2006-09-05 02:24:40

Gullible Jones wrote:

Because it's not free, it's proprietary stuff running in kernel-space.

Just like nvidia? Which is better than all the free drivers we currently have

iphitus · 2006-09-05 06:33:35

For me, alsa works for near everything. Using multiple sounds at once is fine, and it will work fine with an oss app too, provided I have my asound.conf. I've never had the aforementioned 'bad noise' either. 95% of applications out there work with Alsa and dmix. Arts, Gstreamer, libao based apps, mplayer, xine, mpd, SDL, most command line players. It's only a handful, and generally closed source apps that required OSS, and with a correct asound.conf and/or aoss, you can use those at the same time too. For those that dont support Alsa, file bugs and complain.

IMHO, alsa is easier than these, drop the asound.conf in, which I copied from a site, make sure apps use ALSA, and im set.

WIth this, you have to reinstall every few months, and wait for a nag message before it loads.

IANAL, but from my understanding, and the general consensus on LKML which has been determined by lawyers -- it's illegal too, distributing precompiled binary modules linked against the kernel.
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/20 … el_mo.html

James

aquila_deus · 2006-09-05 06:54:35

iphitus wrote:

IANAL, but from my understanding, and the general consensus on LKML which has been determined by lawyers -- it's illegal too, distributing precompiled binary modules linked against the kernel.
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/20 … el_mo.html

But how can this benefit linux users??

iphitus · 2006-09-05 07:06:38

aquila_deus wrote:

iphitus wrote:
IANAL, but from my understanding, and the general consensus on LKML which has been determined by lawyers -- it's illegal too, distributing precompiled binary modules linked against the kernel.
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/20 … el_mo.html
But how can this benefit linux users??

I didnt say it did, but it does put more onus on companies to open source at least parts of their driver.

Take for example ATi, there were murmurs that they would open source their ati-fglrx driver, opening up the driver, and providing restricted things like macrovision as a loadable addon. I'm not sure whether that's still going to happen, but it's entirely plausable.

Or intel, they *have* open sourced their drivers under the same model as I mention above, you can run a completely open source system, but macrovision wont work, -- but you can load something for that.

James

aquila_deus · 2006-09-12 13:40:50

I just added a new wiki page for OSS/Commercial setup and add some more contents

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OSS … cial_Setup

Arch Linux

#1 2006-09-04 02:11:51

Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#2 2006-09-04 03:20:05

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#3 2006-09-04 04:45:45

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#4 2006-09-04 07:11:06

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#5 2006-09-04 08:16:08

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#6 2006-09-04 08:46:27

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#7 2006-09-04 14:12:24

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#8 2006-09-04 15:04:59

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#9 2006-09-04 15:40:46

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#10 2006-09-04 15:59:58

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#11 2006-09-04 17:02:45

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#12 2006-09-04 17:41:14

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#13 2006-09-05 02:24:40

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#14 2006-09-05 06:33:35

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#15 2006-09-05 06:54:35

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#16 2006-09-05 07:06:38

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

#17 2006-09-12 13:40:50

Re: Free OSS/Commercial sound driver!

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