Re: Moving From ProTools to Linux? Good or bad?

dawhead wrote:

my understanding is that there will be one driver for all RME fireface
devices. its not being reverse-engineered - RME are cooperating with
Jonathan to get the driver done.

Glad to hear it. Perhaps other manufacturers will catch on and Jonathan
will have more work than he expected. <g>

i'm not sure if you understand that there are already generic drivers
for all firewire-based devices that use the BeBOB or DICE-II chipsets
(http://ffado.org/).

I'll have to read that page again more carefully. I have a Mackie Onyx
Firewire card which has the BridgeCo chip (BeBOB) and someone
posted that this was working, though he didn't have one to confirm it.
I wonder if the DICE-JR chip in the Allen & Heath ZED-R16 I have here
is close enough to the DICE-II to work with that driver. What I don't have
is a Firewire card in the computer that I have set up for Linux, but that's
not hard to find when I get some time to look for one.

1) the drivers are not part of ALSA (the Linux audio driver "layer"),
they are JACK-only. for people doing pro-audio/music, this isn't
really a problem since all these apps speak JACK anyway. but you won't
find your web-browser able to play back youtube via a fireface 800

That's not a concern for me, but I see people who are asking about this
soft of thing (using other interfaces) having no success with it. "Audio
Professionals" have another computer for YouTube and we try to keep
our studo computers off the net as much as possible.

2) there are not a lot of distributions that include these drivers.
they are spreading, but not really universal yet. its not hard to
install FFADO on a reasonably modern linux distro that doesn't already
have it, but i wouldn't describe this as a task for a user with your
background and point of view.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. <g> Is there a way to make Linux
drivers easy to install? I can follow instructions, but most Linux documentation
assumes more basic knowledge about where things are located than I have.
I guess that's "point of view."

3) most of these devices, despite being based on the same generic
chipset, tend to come with control apps on win & osx to permit control
of their device-specific functions. this includes things like
headphone out volume, mixer setup and more. although we have the
required information to create these apps on linux, for the most part
they don't exist. what you get is the functionality you get from
*every* firewire audio interface (which is quite a lot) but not the
stuff specific to a particular model.

This is the approach that CEntrance took with their Universal Driver
project. They provided I/O capability but didn't support control panels
beyond setting sample rate. They didn't continue the project long
enough to get a lot of flack about it, but they knew it wouldn't be a
very popular approach. Not all of their customers got the idea that the
primary purpose of this driver was not to be a full replacement for
the manufacturer's driver, but rather to use when you needed more
inputs or outputs than what a single interface offered.

finally, a general comment on firewire audio for those who don't know
this (its not linux specific): there are still a disappointing number
of laptops on the market (or on ebay) that use firewire chipsets that
simply can't support audio i/o.

This problem isn't limited to laptops. Whle not too many Intel motherboards
have built-in Firewire yet (and it's going away on many new Mac models),
there are known (and yet-to-be-discovered) incompatibilities between a number
of add-on host interfaces and Firewire audio devices. I always tell people who
ask me what's a good host card to get that it's a crapshoot.




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