FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Open Sound System v3.9 BETA for NetBSD Released. CULVER CITY, CA, July 23, 1998: 4Front Technologies is announcing the availability of the first public BETA release of Open Sound System(TM) (OSS) version 3.9 for NetBSD 1.3.2 for Intel x86 PCs. OSS provides sound card drivers for most popular sound cards under NetBSD. These drivers support digital audio, MIDI, Synthesizers and mixers found on sound cards. These sound drivers comply with the Open Sound System API specification. OSS provides a user-friendly GUI which makes the installation of sound drivers and configuration of sound cards very simple! OSS supports over 200 brand name sound cards as well as sound chipsets found in laptops and motherboards with integrated audio. There is full support for all PnP and PCI audio cards like Ensoniq AudioPCI, Creative PCI64 and S3 Sonic Vibes PCI. On Creative Labs AWE series, there is support for the EMU8000 wavetable synthesizer. OSS drivers support automatic sound card detection, Plug-n-Play support and support for full duplex audio. These driver are Loadable Kernel Modules (LKM) which don't require any kernel recompilation (except when you need to disable the older Voxware drivers). 4Front is also pleased to introduce some new and exciting audio technologies for NetBSD: 1) SoftOSS: SoftOSS provides a software based wave-table engine that can render MIDI and MOD music files without requiring any special wave-table hardware. Any 16bit soundcard can now playback MIDI music via wave-table synthesis. 2) Virtual Mixer: Virtual mixer provides real-time mixing of up to 8 stereo audio channels. Now users can play up to 8 simultaneous audio applications. This allows multiple audio apps to run at the same time without having a "Audio device not available because it's being used by another application" type of situation. 3) Wave Loop: There are two new audio devices (master and slave). One of them is for playback and the other for recording. Waveloop can be used to record the audio data produced by an application such as a MP3 player or Real Audio(TM) player. It's also possible to feed output of a playback application like a MIDI/MOD/MP3 player into a capture application like Real Audio Encoder and stream it directly on the web. Finally, OSS also supports the professional audio hardware like the SB AWE64/Gold (S/PDIF) and Zefiro Acoustics ZA2 cards which can be used with professional studio equipment and DAT players for recording and playing back multichannel audio. For more information and to download a free 7 day evaluation version, visit 4Front's WWW site at http://www.opensound.com/netbsd.html --- xxx --- All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners. Open Sound System is a trademark of 4Front Technologies. Copyright (C) 1996-1998, 4Front Technologies, All Rights Reserved. Contact: Dev Mazumdar 4Front Technologies 4035 Lafayette Place, Unit F Culver City, CA 90232 USA. Tel: (310) 202 8530 E-mail: info@opensound.com Fax: (310) 202 0486 Web: http://www.opensound.com