FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 25, 1996 Contact: Dev Mazumdar 4Front Technologies 11698 Montana Avenue, Suite 12 Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A. Tel: (310) 820 7365 E-mail: info@4front-tech.com Fax: (310) 826 2465 Web: http://www.4front-tech.com ________________________________________________________________________________ Open Sound System for Solaris/x86 2.5.1 and 2.5 LOS ANGELES: 4Front Technologies is pleased to announce the availability of Open Sound System(TM) for Solaris/x86 2.5.1 and 2.5 (OSS/Solaris). OSS/Solaris provides device drivers for a wide variety of sound cards and audio hardware for Solaris running on Intel x86 PCs. OSS/Solaris is a set of kernel modules that allow Solaris users to add digital audio and MIDI music capabilities to their Solaris workstations. Until now, Solaris/x86 only supported the digital audio portion of Creative Labs Sound Blaster soundcards. With OSS/Solaris you are able to plug in virtually any "off-the-shelf" sound card (including PnP cards) and get digital audio and MIDI music features. Users of Solaris/x86 on laptops can now take advantage of their onboard audio capabilities. OSS/Solaris comes with a configuration program which enables users to easily identify and configure their audio hardware. The program can configure multiple soundcards and detects hardware configuration conflicts and allows the user the make necessary changes. OSS/Solaris supports over a 100 brand name soundcards and adding soundcards under Solaris x/86 is a snap!. Functionally, OSS provides support for: --------------------------------------- o 8bit and 16bit stereo digital audio playback and sampling o FM sound synthesis o Wavetable MIDI synthesis o MIDI input and output o Audio Mixer for setting input and output levels OSS represents a major step in the unification of digital audio APIs for UNIX. Currently, each UNIX vendor provides their own proprietary audio API, making it difficult to write cross-platform audio applications. With OSS, developers can design their software on any UNIX platform and be assured that it will be able to compile and run without modification on any other UNIX variant supported by OSS. There already exists a number of public-domain and commercial audio applications written for the OSS API. Open Sound System currently provides drivers for Linux, AIX, SCO, Solaris 2.5.1/Sparc. OSS/Solaris also supports applications written to SUN's "devaudio" API. Such programs will run without modification. With the advent of streaming audio, speech recognition/generation, computer telephony, Java and other multimedia technologies, applications on Solaris can now provide the same audio features as those found in applications written for Windows NT, OS/2, Windows 95 and the Macintosh operating systems. Solaris software developers interested in adding audio support can get complete documentation on the OSS API at http://www.4front-tech.com/pguide Visitors to 4Front's Web site at http://www.4front-tech.com/solaris.html can download a free version of OSS/Solaris and test-drive it for a limited time. --- xxx --- All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners. Open Sound System is a trademark of 4Front Technologies. Copyright (C) 1996, 4Front Technologies, All Rights Reserved.