I use ossv4 instead of alsa because apparently OSS4 works much better than alsa in term of system resource consumption, sound quality as well as features.

But kmix in this new release KDE 4.2.2 doesn't support ossv4, when you open kmix it's blank, with NO sliders. I have been googling about this for a while, and couldn't find any good solution. It seems it's a known problem since 2007, I am just wondering is there any easy to make kmix work with oss4?

Thanks a lot, guys!

It appears that while code is present, the OSS code has not been included in the CMakeLists.txt, meaning it will not be included when KMix is built.

Unfortunately I do not know how to use OSS from CMake, however (assuming the code is still compatible) it should be quite easy to re-enable. You may wish to contact the KMix team.

Thanks a lot for the information!
How can I contact the Kmix team?

I believe they use the "kde-multimedia@kde.org" Mailing list.

Please update this thread if you find the required information. If I knew it was supported it would have made my life easier when I was using OSS (I wrote my own scripts to change the volume from keyboard shortcuts).

Zarin wrote:Please update this thread if you find the required information. If I knew it was supported it would have made my life easier when I was using OSS (I wrote my own scripts to change the volume from keyboard shortcuts).

No problem. I have already send email to kdemultimedia group, but that channal is apparently member post only, and my post is examined by the administrator right now, and hopeful it arouse enough attention from them.

Let's hope.

Relevant bugreports:

Bug 162926 – OSS4 is not supported
Bug 166591 – [patch] Kmix Does Not Work With OSS4

Yes, I saw that post, too.

Strangely, some people mentioned on ArchLinux forum that their kmix in KDE4.2 works fine with OSSv4, and it looks damn sexy!



Here is the post:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=536474#p536474

So is this issue sound card related?

It only work with some sound card?
It's not supposed to be, :-(

BTW, there is now brand new Qt4 OSS 4.1 Mixer.

I will test it at home when I'm back from work.

Great, that looks good! I will try it out.
Here is the reply from KDE developers:

Well, no luck at this time fro OSS4.
Original code remounts from old OSS, and current kmix handles "per mixer
driver" entries, so we have alsa post 0.9, sun os mixer, old oss at last.
We way behind to add support for things like pulse, windows ( don't have sure
if it's possible), and OSS4, so we have a work to do.
There's a proposal in summer of code to revamp some of this handling code and
touch pulse issues, and other irc genius ideas from solid guys, but not too
much beyond that.

Here is the link:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-multimedia&m=123979961220717&w=2