| | Open Sound System |
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There are many more "possible" audio formats that are missing from the OSS API. This is not a limitation but an intentional omission. We have left these formats out from the API to make the life of programmers easier. Because OSS doesn't define such formats you don't need to pay any attention on them.
The industry practice is that 16, 24 and 32 samples are always stored in signed formats. For this reason there are no SFMT_U24_xx and AFMT_U32_xx formats defined in soundcard.h.
There is only one floating point format (AFMT_FLOAT defined in the OSS API. Unlike some other audio APIs we have defined only the "native" floating point format. There are no endianess variations such as AFMT_FLOAT_BE because they have no practical use. Also there is no need for AFMT_DOUBLE since the 24 bit precision of the "float" type is good enough for audio use.