You might think, like I did: Isn’t OSS dead? Didn’t ALSA replace it ages ago?
Open Sound System - Much better!
The answer, as I learnt, was both yes and no. It did die, only to be revived later by 4Front Technologies who developed it under a commercial license for quite sometime. It went GPL only recently, although with a paid premium-support and on certain platforms only. The improvements made in it are simply amazing. I’ll leave the rest of the mystery to be covered by 4Front’s own blog post. It’s a nice read 
The following guide on how to shift to OSS from PulseAudio/ALSA is for Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope, 9.04*) users alone. A proper guide to ArchLinux’s solution might be found here.
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