Open Sound System

Open Sound System is an audio subsystem that provides a cross platform API and device drivers for most consumer and professional audio devices for UNIX® and POSIX based operating systems, including Linux. Owing to its open architecture, applications developed on one supporting operating system platform can be easily recompiled on any other platform. Open Sound System on Solaris supports x86, AMD64 and Sparc processors. It also provides support for the Solaris Audio API (SADA or commonly known as devaudio). SADA applications will transparently run on top of Open Sound System drivers and will co-exist with OSS API compatible applications.

Features
Manual

Features

Some of the features in OSSv4.

Supported audio formats

Supports 8/16/24/32 bits/sample audio formats
Supports sampling rates from 8KHz up to 200KHz
Supports mono, stereo, quad, 5.1, 7.1 and multichannel audio devices

Transparent Software based Audio Mixer

Allows applications to share the same "real" audio device regardless of what format is requested by the application.
Supports recording and full duplex in addition to playback.
Ability to mix stereo and multichannel audio streams up to 7.1/200Khz/32bit.
Supports full 24 bit range without loss of precision during internal computations.
Each application has its own independant volume controls.
Supports loop back recording. This enables you to "record-what-you-hear". Typically this is useful for recording streaming audio or trapping audio from applications

Other

64bit internal processing guarantees audio fidelity and precision if the audio data needs to be converted.
New device enumeration and mixer API makes it very easy to manage devices programatically.

Unimplemented or incomplete

Power management features like support for suspend/resume (works ok in Draco using workaround)
Jacksense may not work (especially the hdaudio cards found on many laptops have such problems)