RSS 
So I recall aoss being glitchy at times and generally not working with complex apps. At least that's what I recall.
So what is aoss? It's a program that acts as a wrapper around Unix apps that use the OSS sound system and silently converts their OSS calls to ALSA ones. Why is this useful?
a) I'm pretty sure each OSS app can lock the sound card, which is pretty lame on any modern system.
b) Because for some reason, some apps still use it, or are compile with OSS support instead of ALSA suport, still in this day and age.
Case point: Qemu on Ubuntu hardy still seems want to use OSS. I can't imagine why and I'm pretty sure it should support ALSA. I never had problems with it on Gentoo, but on Ubuntu it initializes it's OSS sound driver, and then fails to lock the sound card and so Qemu runs silently. Since I only use it to emulate Win98 for a few classic games, sound is pretty needed. So today on a lark I thought I'd try aoss.
aoss qemu -hda hd/win98.img -cdrom cd/dk.iso -soundhw sb16
And what do you know? It worked like a charm. Kudos. I'm impressed, pleased, and thankful.
