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FreeBSD Audio

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Re: FreeBSD Audio

#51

Post by peatmoss »

arp242 wrote: post #44
peatmoss wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember using the OSS drivers and even paying for the commercial version at one point. The experience was great, and I hated it because it was a repudiation of Open Source, which was a big part of my identity back then. I had sold out to the man for working audio… but work it did.

Considering that OSS was (and still is) run by just a few people and is a small company, I don't think it's "selling out to the man"; it's not Microsoft or Amazon or anything. They tried to be as "open source as possible" while still ensuring they've got money to it. I don't think anyone got very rich from it. Although details differ, all of this is still not really a solved problem today. People want to have their c…

Oh, yes, certainly my comment about selling out to the man was made tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at my younger self and how very serious I was about these things in the past. I am happy to see OSS earn some money for their efforts, even if my general personal disposition is still for open source.

I was a bit surprised to hear they are still a business in 2021. I see they are still releasing OSS and much of it under a GPL license too. I gather their OSS product customers must have some specialist sound system requirements for Linux / FreeBSD.

Re: FreeBSD Audio

#52

Post by arp242 »

peatmoss wrote: post #51
arp242 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that OSS was (and still is) run by just a few people and is a small company, I don't think it's "selling out to the man"; it's not Microsoft or Amazon or anything. They tried to be as "open source as possible" while still ensuring they've got money to it. I don't think anyone got very rich from it. Although details differ, all of this is still not really a solved problem today. People want to have their c…

Oh, yes, certainly my comment about selling out to the man was made tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at my younger self and how very serious I was about these things in the past. I am happy to see OSS earn some money for their efforts, even if my general personal disposition is still for open source. I was a bit surprised to hear they are still a business in 2021. I see they are still releasing OSS and much of it under a…

I'm not sure if they're really "in business" as such; it gets some very occasional updates for new kernels (last release: 2019), but that's about it. See e.g.: http://ossnext.trueinstruments.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&...

With ALSA, Pulseaudio, and now Pipewire there's not much point really; maybe it's better but that ship has sailed, on Linux anyway. It's become VHS vs. Betamax-kind of lamenting.

4Front seems to be working on https://www.truepianos.com now; though that one's not open source and no Linux version either.

Re: FreeBSD Audio

#53

Post by justin66 »

md8z wrote: post #49
justin66 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that PulseAudio's introduction wasn't highly disruptive to end users is completely ahistorical. People were pretty pissed off about it, and not because something changed under the covers in a totally seamless and trouble-free way. I sort of felt for Lennart Poettering for all the abuse [0] he got (I guess it helped that I'd already given up on using Linux as a desktop, so it could be as broken as it wanted…

"The notion that PulseAudio's introduction wasn't highly disruptive to end users is completely ahistorical." I never said it wasn't, there were plenty of bugs in PulseAudio. Please make sure not to argue straw men. The statement I have an issue with is claiming that disruption was caused by apps needing to be rewritten for PulseAudio, which was most likely not the case. PulseAudio even had a compatibility mode for ES…

> The statement I have an issue with is claiming that disruption was caused by apps needing to be rewritten for PulseAudio,

There's not any doubt about that. Things were broken all over the place until they were patched. It was awful.

> which was most likely not the case.

It's weird that you're writing as if this was a hypothetical period that human beings did not actually live through, such that we can only speculate about it.

Re: FreeBSD Audio

#54

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

asveikau wrote: post #39
md8z wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have an account on Lobsters so I can't comment there, but that comment is pretty awful and includes some revisionist history nonsense. The author seriously has their timeline mixed up and doesn't seem to be aware of what actually happened in Linux land, so I would take everything they say with a grain of salt. I have no idea why Linux audio seems to invite so much FUD. "A bit later, a new version of OSS came…

> Various other Linux developers have also expressed unhappiness with deficiencies in the OSS API [3]. Wanted to see what this meant so i read the citation. I think this is what I found most relevant: > There are two separate models that can be used between the software and the hardware. In a "push" model, the application decides when to read or write data and how much, while the "pull" model reverses that, requiring…

I am the author of the comment you cited. You've apparently understood it well.
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