4Front OSS was the professional low latency audio choice
Noted.
However, none of the folks I knew at the time who doing professional recording were using PCs or Macs to do the recording and mixing, they were using standalone gear.
It's entirely possible that the folks I knew were not a representative sampling of all sound engineers.
Um. If we're talking about 2005, we're talking about Android.
If we're talking about Android, we're talking about brand-spanking new hardware on a brand-spanking new phone.
This means that the audio driver didn't exist, which means that it was being written from scratch. This makes the "driver problem" a non-issue.
> Remember we're talking Linux in the 2005-era (~2.6.10-ish), not Linux today. ... ALSA was still mostly broken at the time. Most stuff still wanted OSS.
I never tried to do any "pro audio", [0] but that's not how I remember it. ALSA worked just fine. Anything that wanted OSS worked well enough with ALSA's OSS-compat API. I can't remember if the software mixer was around or not at the time, but I remember that when it did arrive, it eliminated that problem with single-stream sound cards.
[0] But -as I remember it- most folks doing pro audio used specialized, standalone hardware for it back then.