Specifications

3.4.1. OSS/4Front
Sound support in the Linux kernel was originally written by Hannu Savolainen. Hannu then went on to
develop the Open Sound system, a commercial set of sound drivers sold by 4Front Technologies that is
supported on a number of Unix systems. Red Hat Software sponsored Alan Cox to enhance the kernel sound
drivers to make them fully modular. Various other people also contributed bug fixes and developed additional
drivers for new sound cards. These modified drivers were shipped by Red Hat in their 5.0 through 5.2
releases. These changes have now been integrated into the standard kernel as of version 2.0. Alan Cox is now
the maintainer of the standard kernel sound drivers, although Hannu still periodically contributes code taken
from the commercial driver.
The commercial Open Sound System driver from 4Front Technologies tends to be easier to configure and
support more sound cards, particularly the newer models. It is also compatible with applications written for
the standard kernel sound drivers. The disadvantage is that you need to pay for it, and you do not get source
code. You can download a free evaluation copy of the product before deciding whether to purchase it. For
more information see the 4Front Technologies web page at http://www.opensound.com.
3.4.2. ALSA
Jaroslav Kysela and others started writing an alternate sound driver for the Gravis UltraSound Card. The
project was renamed Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) and has resulted in what they believe is a
more generally usable sound driver that can be used as a replacement for the built−in kernel drivers. The
ALSA drivers support a number of popular sound cards, are full duplex, fully modularized, and compatible
with the sound architecture in the kernel. The main web site of the ALSA project is
http://www.alsa−project.org. A separate "Alsa−sound−mini−HOWTO" is available which deals with
compiling and installing these drivers. The ALSA drivers may move into the standard Linux kernel as part of
the 2.5 kernel development.
3.4.3. Turtle Beach
Markus Mummert (mum@mmk.e−technik.tu−muenchen.de) has written a driver package for the Turtle
Beach MultiSound (classic), Tahiti, and Monterey sound cards. The documentation states:
It is designed for high quality hard disk recording/playback without losing sync even on a busy system. Other
features such as wave synthesis, MIDI and digital signal processor (DSP) cannot be used. Also, recording and
playback at the same time is not possible. It currently replaces VoxWare and was tested on several kernel
versions ranging from 1.0.9 to 1.2.1. Also, it is installable on UN*X SysV386R3.2 systems.
It can be found at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mccreary/tbeach.
3.4.4. Roland MPU−401
Kim Burgaard ([e-mail]) has written a device driver and utilities for the Roland MPU−401
MIDI interface. The Linux software map entry gives this description:
The Linux Sound HOWTO
3.4.1. OSS/4Front 7