Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 00:28:34 -0500 (CDT) From: "Conrad J. Sabatier" <conrads@cox.net> To: 4Front Technologies <dev@opensound.com> Cc: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Does anyone compose music using any of the portsfromthe/ports/audio collection in FreeBSD? Message-ID: <XFMail.20040715002834.conrads@cox.net> In-Reply-To: <40F59CE0.1070008@opensound.com>
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On 14-Jul-2004 4Front Technologies wrote: > > I think ALSA is going to be really [difficult] to port to FreeBSD > (without a lot of internal changes to FreeBSD kernel) because of > high dependance on the Linux's /proc file system and Linux system > calls that just arn't available for FreeBSD. Yes, most unfortunate that is. I do believe this is one area where FreeBSD should concede the fact that the other guys are doing a better job at it than we are, and not resist the idea of borrowing from them. > OSS apps for Linux work nicely with FreeBSD's Linux emulation (case > in point, check out Skype for Linux). Perhaps, but still, native support is what we need and want. Speaking of which, I was browsing 4Front's site the other day and was a little disappointed to see that even the existing FreeBSD support is not available for amd64. Is that likely to change anytime in the future? > I'm not sure how well a Linux binary that has a high reliance on > /proc and other Linux oddities will work on FreeBSD. My guess would be "not very well at all". :-) > OSS is designed with "pure" UNIX sematics - > read/write/ioctl/poll/mmap and nothing else. Ofcourse I could be > wrong about porting ALSA. Just that from our experiences on > developing the ALSA emulation, it looked highly suspect. Perhaps it's time to consider that what's needed is a new framework for sound development. If the existing "pure Unix semantics" are insufficient, then there's nothing wrong with a little innovation. > It's actually easier to add OSS support to most apps. The problem is > that none of the app developers have really understood OSS > sequencers because they are lowlevel. ALSA provides better high > level abstraction but we have already done a libOSSlib.a sequencer > abstraction for OSS - nobody bothered with it. That's a shame. I suspect it may have largely to do with the fact that, as someone else mentioned in this thread, until we have better hardware sound device support -- say, the ability to interface a MIDI keyboard or even simply supporting *all* of a particular card's capabilities-- then whatever such a library may have to offer will still be of limited usefulness. > As for MIDI I/O, OSS already has powerful support for MIDI input and > output that are also the basis for ALSA. Where ALSA seems to be > ahead is in terms of sequencing and this part is in the ALSA > libraries rather than the kernel drivers. Yes, this seems to be the main, crucial "missing link". > We started with a project called Cuckoo - as a proof of concept that > ALSA isn't all that it's cracked up to be (except for MIDI and even > in MIDI, they rely on the OSS lowlevel MIDI/Sequencer drivers). > > We just gave up trying to keep pace with ALSA that keeps changing on > a weekly basis - now the Cuckoo module will not compile on the > latest ALSA drivers in the Linux 2.6.7 kernels. QNX used ALSA 0.5 > and gave up trying to keep pace and now QNX Audio is something like > ALSA but none of the ALSA apps can actually recompile on QNX without > major work. Is there any hope at all of the Unix sound development community ever coming together and agreeing on a cross-platform standard? This seems to be what's really needed, IMHO. > We are working on OSS v4.0 and we would like to first invite FreeBSD > audio driver maintainers to sit down with us and implement all the > new mixer extension features that will allow FreeBSD driver > developers to extend the old OSS mixer APIs to support more pro > audio devices. OSS's mixer extensions are sane and aren't like > ALSA's flat space (try running alsamixer on SBLive in Linux and then > compare our OSS mixer in FreeBSD and you'll see how well it's > designed). This brings to mind yet another problem we face in FreeBSD: it appears to me that the number of people actively involved in audio driver support and development are pitifully few, far fewer than are really needed to provide a wide range of complete support for a good variety of hardware. I'd volunteer to help out myself (I'm a fairly competent C coder), but I would need a "crash course" in pretty much *everything* having to do with sound and kernel driver development (which, of course, is most likely completely unrealistic to even think about). > We have some work to do in the MIDI Sequencer space. We plan to > address this and we'll be happy to share our work with FreeBSD > developers. Just that right now, we see that MIDI isn't important > for music creation. BROING!!! MIDI is *the* single most important aspect of music creation for most people. I'm astonished to see such a statement. > Companies like MAudio are more focussed on pro audio than MIDI. The > M-Audio Revolution 7.1 audio card doesn't even have a MIDI port. I don't know the first thing about this company or this card, so I can't comment, other than to reiterate that MIDI is very, very important for musicians. > We do plan on doing proper ALSA emulation for audio and MIDI by > completely rewriting the ALSA Libraries to use OSS rather than ALSA > lowlevel drivers. It can be done, just a whole lot of work is > needed. It's a better approach than using the Cuckoo concept because > ALSA keeps changing internally and the only thing relatively stable > would be the ALSA libraries. I hope that we have the time and man > power to pull this off. Well, this certainly sounds encouraging! Is there a mailing list for tracking the state of development? I'm sure I'm not the only FreeBSD user who'd be very interested in this. > Right now there are so many cooler things we can do with audio - like > 3D spatialization and other neat features (check out > http://www.oss3d.com/usite/tech.html) That's all very nice, too, but *please* keep MIDI in mind! :-) > BTW, we're working on OSS 3.99.1 for FreeBSD (please see my post on > the open() call under the freebsd-hackers ML). If we can get that > going, audio for FreeBSD will totally rock. Thank you very much for posting this; you've given me hope! :-) And please don't forget the amd64 platform, either. :-) Take care, Conrad -- Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads@cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"
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