On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Jonathan
Woithe<jwoithe@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> AFAIK FFADO got started through the cooperation of one or two vendors and as
> momentum has built additional vendors have come on board to a greater or
> lesser extent. I expect something similar will have to happen for
> professional USB2 audio devices to be generally supported under Linux.
This misses out on the most important step in the evolution of FFADO.
Before FFADO was Freebob, an open source implementation of software to
support the BeBob API. Freebob was a project that was started by
someone who worked for the company that developed the Bebob chipsets
(Bridge Co.), and at least for some time, that company was very
supportive of the effort. This allowed Freebob to evolve relatively
rapidly because there was not much of a problem getting the
information required. Then, when another company (TC Electronic) began
work on their generation of firewire audio chipsets (called DICE), and
noticed that there were a number of companies interested in building
Linux-driven devices that would also use firewire for audio I/O, the
existence of Freebob convinced them to seek out the two people
involved in that project and pursue drivers for their new chipsets. I
was happy to play a tiny role in helping this meeting to take place
(very tiny).
The problem with USB2 is that it doesn't seem as though there is any
similar embedded systems interest in linux support for audio over
USB2, and nor is there a single company (or 2 companies) with a choke
hold on the chipsets used for this. This makes the problem a lot
harder to solve. Maybe the companies that were thinking about firewire
audio are now thinking about USB2 audio, but if they are I don't have
my ear close enough to the ground to hear.
As Jonathan said, please buy interfaces from companies that have
actively supported the existence of quality device drivers for their
products on Linux. And please tell them that you did so, and why.
--p
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Received on Fri Jul 10 08:15:01 2009
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