FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 4Front Technologies announces Open Sound System for AIX 4.1/PowerPC ------------------------------------------------------------------- LOS ANGELES, CA. August 19, 1996: 4Front Technologies is pleased to announce the availability of Open Sound System(TM) for IBM's AIX 4.1.4 running on the PowerPC (PCI/ISA bus based). OSS/AIX provides device drivers for a wide variety of sound cards and audio hardware for AIX running on PowerPCs. OSS/AIX is a set of dynamically loadable kernel modules that allow AIX users to add digital audio and MIDI music capabilities to their AIX workstations. OSS/AIX comes with complete SMIT and ODM configuration which enable users to easily configure ISA soundcards as well as on-board audio devices on the PowerPC's motherboard. OSS/AIX supports over a 50 brand name soundcards and the SMIT menus to add these ISA devices have default hardware settings that enables users to install their soundcards in a snap! OSS provides compatibility for AIX's Ultimedia Services (UMS) and allows any UMS compatible application to run on the OSS/AIX drivers without modifications. OSS/AIX also support Java audio applications. There already exists a wide variety of audio software on the Internet written to the OSS API and running on Linux. These applications come with source code and can be easily recompiled on AIX using the Linux defaults. Additionally, there are several packages on 4Front's Web site that have been precompiled for AIX. 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. OSS/AIX will also be providing support for IBM's Ultimedia Services (UMS) in the near future. This will enable UMS compliant applications to run on the OSS/AIX drivers without modification. With the advent of streaming audio, speech recognition/generation, computer telephony, Java and other multimedia technologies, applications on AIX can now provide the same audio features as those found on applications written for Windows NT, OS/2, Windows 95 and the Macintosh operating systems. AIX 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/aix.html can download a free version of OSS/AIX and test-drive it for 5 days. --- 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. Contact: Dev Mazumdar 4Front Technologies 11698 Montana Avenue, Suite 12 Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A. Tel: (310) 820 7365 Fax: (310) 826 2465 E-mail: dev@4front-tech.com WWW: http://www.4front-tech.com