Open Sound System
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| Open Sound System | |
|---|---|
| Design by | Hannu Savolainen |
| Developed by | 4Front Technologies |
| Initial release | 1992 |
| Latest release | 4.0 |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Audio |
| License | BSD License / Common Development and Distribution License / GNU General Public License / Proprietary |
| Website | http://www.opensound.com/ |
The Open Sound System (OSS) is a standard interface for making and capturing sound in Unix operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices (i.e. POSIX read, write, ioctl, etc.). The term also refers sometimes to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; in that sense it can be thought of as a device driver or collection of device drivers for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow one to write a sound-based application program that works with any sound controller hardware, even though the hardware interface varies greatly from one type to another.
OSS was created in 1992 by Hannu Savolainen and is available in 11 major Unix-like operating systems. OSS is distributed under four licence options, three of which are free software licences, thus making OSS free software.[1]
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[edit] Free, proprietary, free
The project was initially free software, but following the project's success, Savolainen started the company 4Front Technologies and made his support for newer sound devices and improvements proprietary. In response, eventually the Linux community abandoned the OSS/free implementation included in the kernel (an outdated 3.x version, while 4front continued working on 4.x[1]) and development effort switched to the replacement Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Many free software operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD continued to distribute previous versions of OSS, and continued to maintain and improve these versions.
In July 2007, 4Front Technologies released sources for OSS under CDDL for OpenSolaris and GPL for Linux.[1] In January 2008, 4Front Technologies released OSS for FreeBSD (and other BSD systems) under BSD License.[2]
[edit] OSS in relation to ALSA
In the Linux kernel, there have historically been two uniform sound APIs used. One is OSS; the other is ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). ALSA is available for Linux only, and as there is only one implementation of the ALSA interface, ALSA refers equally to that implementation and to the interface itself.
OSS is the standard up through the 2.4 series of official (kernel.org) Linux kernels. ALSA was added starting with 2.5, and in those versions, Linux kernel authors marked OSS as deprecated. 4Front continued to develop OSS outside of Linux kernel.
ALSA provides an optional OSS emulation mode that appears to programs as if it were OSS. Similarly, there is an ALSA emulation mode in the Linux implementation of OSS.
While some recommend the ALSA interface for software that is intended to work on modern Linux only, software intended to be portable across Unixes typically uses OSS instead. Another advantage of OSS is that it's better documented than ALSA and the API is much simpler.[citation needed]
[edit] OSS/3D
OSS/3D is a plugin for music players, which acts as an audio postprocessing engine. Supported players include Winamp, Windows Media Player (9 or later), musicmatch, Sonique, Foobar2000, JetAudio, XMMS. It is ported to Windows and Linux platforms. Unlike the OSS, it is shareware.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- http://www.opensound.com/
- Building the Open Sound System From Source
- Sorry State of Sound in Linux
- OSS is dead. Long live OSS!
