On 16/10/2007, Brian Cameron <Brian.Cameron at sun.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure.  I believe OSS does have some MIDI functionality, though I
> believe it is not going to initially be supported when OSS goes into
> Solaris Nevada.  I'm not really sure, but I think MIDI support is coming
> later.

That's right, OSS currently has no midi support in v4.

> The main advantage of OSS is that there is an active effort, supported
> by Sun, to port it properly to Solaris.  I wouldn't say that OSS is
> better than ALSA because ALSA is older.  ALSA is a competing framework
> that is, at the moment, favored on many Linux distributions.  However,

No, OSS is actually older than ALSA. OSS was originally the sound
system for Linux, ALSA came later.

> the new OSS 4.0 rewrite will likely increase the competition a bit,
> especially since they have now made OSS truly freesource.  The fact
> that OSS used to not be free was the main reason that ALSA was created.

Yes and no. There was already an OSS framework and drivers in the
Linux kernel. However, they were largely unmaintained, and it is true
that the commercial version not being open was part of it.

-- 
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. " --Donald Knuth

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