# oss and alsa



## raid (Nov 14, 2010)

I notice that on some of the sound cards I've used with FreeBSD, I can choose to simply load the kernel module for the sound card, or install OSS from ports and let it handle everything.  Which of these two approaches is best to use for a typical desktop type of system?  Ok, that's probably a poor question... what does OSS do that just loading the kernel module does not (and visa versa)?

I also notice several ports in ports/audio with the word 'alsa' in them.  Is there now a complete implementation of ALSA that can be used as a replacement for OSS?


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## eye (Nov 14, 2010)

FreeBSD has its own implementation of OSS, not from 4Front Technologies (i.e. audio/oss). ALSA on FreeBSD is just a wrapper around OSS, it doesn't have a kernel backend.


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