Hello
After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided to give OSS4 a try. After some googling, installing a few packages and some minor configuration, OSS4 was up and running, and I must admit the improvement in sound quality is rather significant!
To minimise the hassle, I decided to set up ALSA emulation, and initially I kept Pulseaudio as well. I configured applications with native OSS support (e.g. Audacious) to output to OSS4 directly. With the settings below, Gnome applications that use Gstreamer should output directly to OSS4 as well. Everything else will probably either use the ALSA libraries or Pulseaudio, both of which now output to OSS4. However, in the end I removed Pulseaudio altogether as the applications I used did not really require
Assignment Help it...
Here's how I did it:
In a terminal, run sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-sound-base
Choose OSS. This should, among other things, prevent the ALSA modules from loading. Reboot.
There are (at least) four ways to install OSS4:
Install from the Ubuntu repositories (not recommended):
sudo apt-get install oss4-base oss4-dkms oss4-source oss4-gtk
This will automatically rebuild the OSS modules when your kernel is updated, and is the preferred way of installing third-party kernel modules. However, the oss4-dkms package is currently broken for Ubuntu (bug #519577). There is a workaround, but for the time being it's best to use the package from the Opensound website.
Best regards
angellily