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.

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. Currently this program doesn't
support selecting the output port. Use the audiocontrol program of Solaris
for this purpose.

- 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.

- 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
spesific information for using some cards:

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

	README.awe		Sound Blaster AWE/32/64 cards
	README.za2		Zefiro Acoustics ZA2
