FAQ002

From the ALSA wiki

The FAQs have been reorganized. The new location of this question is FAQ#Can I use my old OSS apps with ALSA?

Can I use my old OSS apps with ALSA?

Most of the OSS apps work very well with ALSA's kernel-level OSSEmulation [to use this you need to load three ALSA modules snd-pcm-oss , snd-seq-oss and snd-mixer-oss].

However, the OSS sequencer module snd-seq-oss which emulates /dev/sequencer only half works with OSS MIDI sequencers. Recording from MIDI keyboards does not work; it produces MIDI files with corrupted time-values for note-on and note-off events. This is a known bug (see alsa-devel 2004/02/02 2002/8/26 and 2003/12/7'). Playback to MIDI keyboards works ok.

Optionally you can use the aoss script from the alsa-oss package. It has the advantage of being able to use the PCM plugin layer of ALSA. This enables you to use software-mixing for both capture and playback. For more info, see the pages about DmixPlugin, OssEmulation and AlsaTips.

Sometimes problems arise when an app uses mmap'd mode. Check the OssEmulation page for more details and also look at FAQ023.