OSS4 on Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx)

“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