Re: Release goal: stop using /dev/dsp on Linux

[Mark Brown <broonie@sirena.org.uk>]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 12:56:45AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:

> OSS in Linux is unmaintained, doesn't support much current hardware, and
> will not be included in future kernel packages.  Unfortunately, there
> are still some applications living in the 90s and trying to write to
> /dev/dsp.  These can be worked around using "aoss" or other wrappers
> that use a preload library to redirect /dev/dsp, but users should not
> have to do this.  The snd-pcm-oss module provides /dev/dsp on top of
> ALSA, but it doesn't work with software mixing.

I intend to recommend that applications follow Lennart Poettering's
audio API guide when updating their code:

   http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis.html 

which provides a good overview of the available options when doing this.