Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 18:30 +0000, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:
> On 1/21/08, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It may be open, but it isn't much of a standard.
> > I've only found one implementation, csound itself.
> > There are no hardware implementations.
> 
> See, just because a standard is less used than another standard it
> doesn't make it worse.  It just turns out less people bothered to
> support it.  Striving for the best should always be our goal,
> humanity's goal.  So let's not use that as an argument against Csound,
> which by the way, I had never heard of until this thread.
> 
> This thread started because 1) ALSA is awful, 2) There is no OSS
> emulation in the XO which breaks some programs, and 3) IMO, I would
> love if we could seriously discuss switching OSS for ALSA.  See, ALSA
> is a worse standard for audio in Linux.
> 
> Again, just because it's not the favored standard, doesn't mean it
> shouldn't be considered.
> 
> Many reasons were already pointed out, but I would like in my last
> message to this thread, to point out the pratical reasons:
> 
> * It's easier to maintain
> * It's easier to write software to work with it
> * It uses much less resources than ALSA, and we are trying to spare
> resources on this project
> * It is a bad idea to use workarounds, emulation, and frameworks all
> to go around problems in ALSA

Except that it's completely insane to try to diverge from the upstream
kernel and userland here.  Plus, does OSS support software mixing so
that multiple processes pumping out different bitrates and channels of
audio can all talk to the same sound device at the same time?  Granted,
ALSA doesn't have that working as well as I'd like, but if OSS doesn't
support that then there is no point in switching to OSS.

Dan