FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 24, 1997 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 FreeBSD 2.2 Announced! LOS ANGELES: 4Front Technologies is announcing the availability of Open Sound System(TM) for FreeBSD 2.2 also known as OSS/FreeBSD. OSS/FreeBSD provides sound card drivers for most popular sound cards under FreeBSD. These drivers support digital audio, MIDI, Synthesizers and mixers found on sound cards. OSS/FreeBSD provides a user-friendly GUI which makes the installation of sound drivers and configuration of sound cards very simple! OSS/FreeBSD supports Plug-n-Play (PnP) soundcards. OSS/FreeBSD supports over 150 brand name sound cards as well as sound chipsets found in laptops and motherboards with integrated audio. OSS/FreeBSD drivers support automatic sound card detection, plug-n-play, and can be dynamically loaded and unloaded into the kernel. There is no need for recompiling kernels or editing cryptic configuration files to enable sound support in FreeBSD. OSS/FreeBSD will support most of the older VoxWare (now known as Open Sound System) audio applications as well as Java audio. 4Front is also pleased to introduce its SoftOSS technology for FreeBSD. 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. SoftOSS provides real-time mixing of up to 32 audio channels. SoftOSS is ideally suited for game developers and audio/video conferencing. More information on SoftOSS can be found at http://www.4front-tech.com/softoss.html In addition to SoftOSS, 4Front is also introducing the Direct Music API which allows the Yamaha FM synthesizer found on most sound cards to be used in applications other than MIDI music. By giving direct access to the registers, users can apply the FM synthesizer to may different applications such as acoustic modeling, signal and tone generation, sound effects and many more. Finally, OSS/FreeBSD also supports the professional audio hardware like the Zefiro Acousics ZA2 card which can be used with professional studio equipment as well as DAT players for recording and playing back multichannel audio. OSS/FreeBSD sound drivers comply with the Open Sound System API specification. FreeBSD users can visit 4Front's WWW site at http://www.4front-tech.com/ to download a "free" trial version of OSS/FreeBSD or buy a fully licensed version of OSS/FreeBSD for only $20.00. The licensed version of OSS/FreeBSD comes with free technical support and free updates to the drivers. --- xxx --- All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners. Open Sound System is a trademark of 4Front Technologies. Copyright (C) 1996,1997 4Front Technologies, All Rights Reserved.