Hello everybody,
I want to make the point with you about NetBSD audio in 2016.
What do we have on other operating system ?
Windows and OSX have their own sound server providing a way to mix different sounds.
GNU/Linux have ALSA (sub-module) and also PulseAudio (sound server over ALSA). Both of them provide a way to mix audio when you need to listen to, for example, speak on a VOiP software and play a game.
FreeBSD have their own OSS compatibility layer (not sure at all how do they do)
OpenBSD have their own sound server called sndio
What about NetBSD ?
Actually, NetBSD has nothing else but the OSS sub-module directly connected to softwares that claim for audio. It simply mean that if a software is using sound, no other software will be able to use it : the audio device will be "busy".
So what should we do ?
I think we should simply make a little layer, a little sound server between softwares and sub-module, very discret, compatible with mixerctl, audioctl, audiocfg etc... and directly included in the kernel for everyone.
I don't think this is an impossible task and even sure it mustn't be hard (I'm not even sure we need to create something for that).
So I am here to ask to people who may have knowledges or ideas to make this possible and help to improve NetBSD experience for newcomers and people who want to use NetBSD for multimedia and desktop usage
Thank you for reading my message, I appreciate it