Sound drivers in Darwin 1.0

B

bwooden

Registered
Are there any sound drivers for, or that come with, Darwin? I was hoping that it would be possible to compile and use XMMS under Darwin. I suppose that it would be no problem to compile and run XMMS with XFree86 and Darwin, but what about sound? I know that there are OSS (Open Sound System) drivers for many different Unices, and that XMMS can output to an OSS device, but I don't think that there is any OSS drivers for Darwin. Any information on either XMMS and/or sound drivers for Darwin would be greatly appreciated.

Bill Wooden
bwooden99@yahoo.com
 
Darwin has sound drivers. I am not an expert, but I think they are kernel extensions (kext) for specific output HW. Have you tried to list /dev directory ? Try to check the I/O Kit in the Mac OS X developers pages @ Apple.

Darwin is the Mac OS X's kernel. since a call to the kernel is the only way to talk to the HW, it should be a way to tell darwin to produce sound...
 
Hello,
I presume that MacOS X must have it's own sound API's that applications use for outputting sound. So, I would suppose that the easiest way to get OSS-based sound applications working under OS X would be to do a "port" of OSS that basically appeared to the application to be the same as under other Unices, but instead of accessing the hardware directly as OSS does under Linux/*BSD/etc, would just "wrap" the native OS X api's for sound. Would this incur a performance penalty? Probably. Is this as good as using the native sound drivers? No. But it is a way to quickly getting Unix multi-media apps running.

Really, the best way to get apps to work with different sound systems on different platforms is to use something similar to the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), which provides a small, fast abstraction library for accessing sound systems (among other things that SDL does) in a platform independent fashion.

Or, hopefully, the OpenAL aims to become for audio what OpenGL is for graphics. An open, extensible standard for accessing audio devices. OpenAL looks to be an attractive alternative, eventually, when it is well supported, for developing multimedia apps that are platform independent.
 
Originally posted by hELLO wORLD
Darwin has sound drivers. I am not an expert, but I think they are kernel extensions (kext) for specific output HW. Have you tried to list /dev directory ? Try to check the I/O Kit in the Mac OS X developers pages @ Apple.


Darwin is the Mac OS X's kernel. since a call to the kernel is the only way to talk to the HW, it should be a way to tell darwin to produce sound...
Click to expand...


Actually I haven't got my hands on Darwin yet, so I couldn't tell you about the /dev directory, but if there is some sort of /dev entry (like /dev/dsp on other systems) maybe it would be a fairly easy task to get sound from these audio programs, like you said.

Bill Wooden
bwooden99@yahoo.com




[Edited by bwooden on 03-09-2001 at 01:24 PM]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top