OSS4 on Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx)

Aug 30, 2010, 12:04 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Levien Van Zon)

"After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided to give OSS4 a try. After some googling, installing a few packages and some minor configuration, OSS4 was up and running, and I must admit the improvement in sound quality is rather significant!

"To minimise the hassle, I decided to set up ALSA emulation, and initially I kept Pulseaudio as well. I configured applications with native OSS support (e.g. Audacious) to output to OSS4 directly. With the settings below, Gnome applications that use Gstreamer should output directly to OSS4 as well. Everything else will probably either use the ALSA libraries or Pulseaudio, both of which now output to OSS4. However, in the end I removed Pulseaudio altogether as the applications I used did not really require it...

"Here's how I did it:"

Complete Story

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