Open Sound System

I am interested in using OSS in conjunction with Alsa. That is, I want to eliminate the alsa oss-emulation and use OSS instead while still keeping alsa.

Would it be sufficient to just compile the alsa kernel drivers without oss-emulation and then compile and install OSS? Or is this not possible?

Alsa keeps their device nodes in a separate /dev/snd directory and there should be no conflict with OSS device nodes.

If this does work, would I then need to re-compile all audio software that uses oss?

fr314159 wrote:I am interested in using OSS in conjunction with Alsa. That is, I want to eliminate the alsa oss-emulation and use OSS instead while still keeping alsa.

Would it be sufficient to just compile the alsa kernel drivers without oss-emulation and then compile and install OSS? Or is this not possible?

Alsa keeps their device nodes in a separate /dev/snd directory and there should be no conflict with OSS device nodes.

If this does work, would I then need to re-compile all audio software that uses oss?

It is possible, and it is very simple.
You may not need to recompile anything.
Unwanted ALSA drivers can be blacklisted.
Unwanted OSS4 drivers can be disabled.

Many audio apps can be configured for ALSA or OSS4. There is no need to recompile them.

Configuring Applications for OSSv4
_http://ossnext.trueinstruments.com/wiki/index.php/Configuring_Applications_for_OSSv4

I am going to post a sort of "howto" (OSS4 + ALSA).

The problem isn't with the /dev/ tree but with interfacing with the actual hardware. If you had two soundcards it may be possible to use one with alsa and the other with oss but the configuration would be a nightmare as left to their own devices each driver would try to auto-configure to use both soundcards.

In a modern Linux distribution it is unusual for alsa sound drivers to be compiled into the kernel. Instead they are built as installable kernel modules and can be found under the /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/sound/ directory. The oss installer makes use of this fact by saving the contents of sound directory tree in a tar.bz2 archive before deleting the folder and all its contents.

An alternative approach may be to install oss4 to obtain the sound quality this provides from applications that use, or can be compiled to use oss (preferably oss4), and use pulseaudio (configured to use oss as its backend) with other applications.

Pulseaudio would also allow you to use remote audio hardware such as Bluetooth headsets or the sound card on a remote (network connected) PC.

seawright wrote:The problem isn't with the /dev/ tree but with interfacing with the actual hardware. If you had two soundcards it may be possible to use one with alsa and the other with oss but the configuration would be a nightmare as left to their own devices each driver would try to auto-configure to use both soundcards.

It is really very simple. Several users did this already. You may find a lot of "howtos" on this forum (but they might be confusing).
I did this (once more) some weeks ago. It works without problems.

seawright wrote:Pulseaudio would also allow you to use remote audio hardware such as Bluetooth headsets of the sound card on a remote (network connected) PC.

I do not use PulseAudio. It is removed.

[HowTo] Running OSS4 together with ALSA
_http://ossnext.trueinstruments.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5865