For a slightly thorough explaination, please refer to
[1] http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/SOUND_4.TXT.html .
Summary of changes includes:
1 Volume Per-Channel (vpc). Provides private / standalone volume control
unique per-stream pcm channel without touching master volume / pcm.
Applications can directly use SNDCTL_DSP_[GET|SET][PLAY|REC]VOL, or for
backwards compatibility, SOUND_MIXER_PCM through the opened dsp device
instead of /dev/mixer. Special "bypass" mode is enabled through
/dev/mixer which will automatically detect if the adjustment is made
through /dev/mixer and forward its request to this private volume
controller. Changes to this volume object will not interfere with
other channels.
Requirements:
- SNDCTL_DSP_[GET|SET][PLAY|REC]_VOL are newer ioctls (OSSv4) which
require specific application modifications (preferred).
- No modifications required for using bypass mode, so applications
like mplayer or xmms should work out of the box.
Kernel hints:
- hint.pcm.%d.vpc (0 = disable vpc).
Kernel sysctls:
- hw.snd.vpc_mixer_bypass (default: 1). Enable or disable /dev/mixer
bypass mode.
- hw.snd.vpc_autoreset (default: 1). By default, closing/opening
/dev/dsp will reset the volume back to 0 db gain/attenuation.
Setting this to 0 will preserve its settings across device
closing/opening.
- hw.snd.vpc_reset (default: 0). Panic/reset button to reset all
volume settings back to 0 db.
- hw.snd.vpc_0db (default: 45). 0 db relative to linear mixer value.
2 High quality fixed-point Bandlimited SINC sampling rate converter,
based on Julius O'Smith's Digital Audio Resampling -
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/resample/. It includes a filter design
script written in awk (the clumsiest joke I've ever written)
- 100% 32bit fixed-point, 64bit accumulator.
- Possibly among the fastest (if not fastest) of its kind.
- Resampling quality is tunable, either runtime or during kernel
compilation (FEEDER_RATE_PRESETS).
- Quality can be further customized during kernel compilation by
defining FEEDER_RATE_PRESETS in /etc/make.conf.
Kernel sysctls:
- hw.snd.feeder_rate_quality.
0 - Zero-order Hold (ZOH). Fastest, bad quality.
1 - Linear Interpolation (LINEAR). Slightly slower than ZOH,
better quality but still does not eliminate aliasing.
2 - (and above) - Sinc Interpolation(SINC). Best quality. SINC
quality always start from 2 and above.
Rough quality comparisons:
- http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/z_comparison/
3 Bit-perfect mode. Bypasses all feeder/dsp effects. Pure sound will be
directly fed into the hardware.
4 Parametric (compile time) Software Equalizer (Bass/Treble mixer). Can
be customized by defining FEEDER_EQ_PRESETS in /etc/make.conf.
5 Transparent/Adaptive Virtual Channel. Now you don't have to disable
vchans in order to make digital format pass through. It also makes
vchans more dynamic by choosing a better format/rate among all the
concurrent streams, which means that dev.pcm.X.play.vchanformat/rate
becomes sort of optional.
6 Exclusive Stream, with special open() mode O_EXCL. This will "mute"
other concurrent vchan streams and only allow a single channel with
O_EXCL set to keep producing sound.
Other Changes:
* most feeder_* stuffs are compilable in userland. Let's not
speculate whether we should go all out for it (save that for
FreeBSD 16.0-RELEASE).
* kobj signature fixups, thanks to Andriy Gapon <avg@freebsd.org>
* pull out channel mixing logic out of vchan.c and create its own
feeder_mixer for world justice.
* various refactoring here and there, for good or bad.
* activation of few more OSSv4 ioctls() (see [1] above).
* opt_snd.h for possible compile time configuration:
(mostly for debugging purposes, don't try these at home)
SND_DEBUG
SND_DIAGNOSTIC
SND_FEEDER_MULTIFORMAT
SND_FEEDER_FULL_MULTIFORMAT
SND_FEEDER_RATE_HP
SND_PCM_64
SND_OLDSTEREO
Manual page updates are on the way.
Tested by: joel, Olivier SMEDTS <olivier at gid0 d org>, too many
unsung / unnamed heroes.
/usr/share/examples/etc/bsd-style-copyright. I've fixed a
few minor wording and formatting differences.
Approved by: matk, Hannu Savolainen <hannu@opensound.com>
Reviewed by: imp
but large parts are rewritten by matk and tanimura.
This is old code, it's not maintained since 2003. We also don't have a
maintainer for this! Yuriy Tsibizov took it and uses it in his emu10kx
driver. Since the emu10kx driver will enter the tree "soon" (some bugs
have to be fixed after Yuriy return from his holidays), I add it here
already.
This also contains some changes to emu10k1 and cmi, so if you're lucky,
you can now make some kind of use of midi with those soundcards.
To all those poor souls which don't have such a card: feel free to send
patches, we don't have a maintainer for this.
To those which miss a specific feature in the midi code: feel free to
submit patches, we don't have a maintainer for this.
Oh, did I already told that it would be nice if someone would take care
of it? Maintainer with midi equipment wanted! :-)
If you get LOR's, submit a PR and notify multimedia@ please. If you get
panics, submit a PR with a backtrace (compile the sound system into your
kernel instead of using modules in this case) and notify multimedia@
please.
Written by: matk, tanimura
Submitted by: "Yuriy Tsibizov" <Yuriy.Tsibizov@gfk.ru>
Based upon: code from NetBSD