On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 2:30 AM, Sid <[email protected]> wrote: > That's good that Jack isn't needed. > It appears, as of the last few months or year, OSS is able to play sounds > from different programs simultaneously. >
​FreeBSD has had the ability to play sounds from multiple programs simultaneously since the 4.x days. Back then, the kernel developed a "virtual channels" layer to accommodate this (program X uses /dev/dsp0, program Y uses /dev/dsp1, program Z uses /dev/dsp2, audio is mixed and played out the speakers together). Later this was done automatically by multiple programs simply accessing /dev/dsp. This was one of the nicer features of FreeBSD 4.x; especially considering the giant cluster-F that audio was on Linux at the time. Their OSS implementation was limited to a single program accessing /dev/dsp at a time, and led to the development of all kinds of userland audio daemons and mixers, and started them down the road to ALSA and eventually PulseAudio (rather than simply fixing the issue in their OSS implementation). KDE 3.x on FreeBSD 4.x was a multimedia wonder and so easy to get working compared to KDE 3 on Linux. KDE 4 and Phonon made this even nicer. -- Freddie Cash [email protected] _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
