Short introduction to OSS
=========================

Using PnP (Plug & Play) soundcards
----------------------------------

This version of OSS/Linux supports most PnP soundcards. Autodetection of
soundcards is performed automaticly when installing OSS/SCO for first time
(step 4). After adding new PnP soundcards to an earlier configured system,
yuou should add the soundcard manually or to use the "Autodetect" feature
(during step 3).

Changing initial mixer volumes
------------------------------

It's possible to save current active mixer settings to be used when OSS/SCO
is started next time. To do this you just need to execute the savemixer
program included in the package.

Verifying if everything works OK
--------------------------------



IMPORTANT! First of all. Do _NOT_ use the "cat" command to play sounds. It
will give incorrect results in most cases. Problems caused by
use of "cat" are the most common ones reported to our technical
support.

Instructions for playing audio and MIDI files will be given in the next
section.

Applications distributed with OSS
---------------------------------

There are few utility programs included in this package. These programs are
installed in the same direcyory than other OSS files (usually /usr/lib/oss).
You may like to copy these programs to /usr/local/bin or some other directory
which is on the PATH. Source code for many (not all) of these programs is
included in the snd-util-3.*.tar.gz package (ftp://ftp.4front-tech.com/ossfree).

- The "play" program is a player program for .wav, .voc and .au files. Use
play -h to get usage information. Note! In some operating systems (Linux
in particular) there is also another "play" program which belongs to the SOX
package. You should ensure that the correct program is used.

- The second program included in this package is "mixer". It can be used for
changing mixer settings and for selecting the recording source (the default is
microphone). Use "mixer -h" for more info.

In case there are more than one mixers (shown at the end of /dev/sndstat
printout), you can access the additional mixers using the following
method:

- cd /usr/lib/oss
- ln -s mixer mixer1
- ln -s mixer mixer2

In this way /usr/lib/oss/mixer1 can be used to control the second mixer.

Currently this program doesn't support selecting the audio output port on
Sparcstation machines. Use the audiocontrol program of Solaris for this
purpose. On IBM RS6000 models 43P and 830 the audio output is connected
only to the line level output (the internal speaker is silent).


- savemixer can be used to store the currently active mixer settings
to /usr/lib/oss/mixer.map. These volume settings will be automaticly loaded
when soundon is executed next time. Note that savemixer also saves the
output port selection so that it will be reactivated automaticly by
subsequent soundon invocations.

- mplay is a MIDI player program which works with all OSS compatible
MIDI and synthesizer cards. This program gives short usage information when
it's started without arguments. This information contains also a list of
available playback devices. It's recommended to try all of them in case the
default one (0) doesn't give expected results.

- xvmixer is an optional mixer program. It's based on XViews and is included
only in OSS/Sparc and OSS/Solaris.

- sfxload is an utility program which can be used to initialize the Emu8000
synthesizer of Sound Blaster AWE/32/64. See README.awe for more info.

Other OSS compatible software
------------------------------

See http://www.4front-tech.com for information about applications that
work with OSS.

In general most audio applications
written for Linux (ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound)
should work after they have been recompiled for Solaris. See programming.txt
for more information about programming and compiling programs with OSS.

Using OSS with some soundcards
------------------------------

There are additional README files in this directory which contain hardware
specific information for using some cards:

File Device
----------- ---------------

README.awe Sound Blaster AWE/32/64 cards
README.soundscape Ensoniq Soundscape family
README.vivo Ensoniq VIVO and VIVO90
README.za2 Zefiro Acoustics ZA2