Re: [LAD] TASCAM US-1641

On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 09:37 +0100, Adrian Knoth wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 07:46:09PM -0500, Jan Depner wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> > I finally couldn't resist anymore so I bought a TASCAM US-1641. At $299
>
> FAIL. You now spend hours (and therefore money) on the software side. ;)
>

    Not really. It works fine on Windows with Cubase and I can still
run my DSP 2000 C-Port on Linux if I only need 10 channels.

> > If anyone has any advice to help me get started you can either post it
> > here or send to me off list (that will at least save everyone else
> > from
>
> You're facing multiple problems:
>
> * How to initialize the device. Firmware upload required?
>

    It came with firmware 1.00 loaded. I did upgrade to 1.02 but I
doubt that it's necessary because I ran it on the 1.00 firmware before I
upgraded.

> * How to trigger special functions, i.e. a builtin mixer?
>

    Not too concerned about that.

> * Which streaming format is used?
>

    Now that is a good question ;-)

>
> You could live without the second, but the other two are important.
> It's basically what the FFADO project does for each firewire interface,
> but with USB-2.0, each vendor implements his own on-wire protocol,
> there's no common platform chip.
>

    Yeah, what a PITA. It's like they all think they've come up with
something magical and they don't want anyone else to know.

> So prepare for a lot of sniffing. (capture the packets your windows
> driver sends to the box and try to understand. There's isochronous
> traffic for the audio streaming and non-iso (async) for device handling)
>
> If nothing helps: run Windows in a VM (virtualbox?), make a USB
> passthrough and then reroute the audio/midi ports via netjack (jackd2)
> back to your Linux machine.
>

    It didn't work well under VirtualBox. It only worked sporadically.

> Don't know if wine can load drivers, if so, you might be able to
> debug/sniff the win driver directly.
>
>

    Actually, there are a couple of USB sniffers for Windows that I'll
probably try.

> In any case, help from your vendor would be a good thing. Try to contact
> him and ask for documentation. I bet the answer will be "We don't care
> about Linux", but if so, please tell us. This way, others could avoid
> buying Tascam in the future. ;)
>

    I contacted TASCAM support last year and they were no help so I
wrote snail mail to the CEO of TASCAM America. No response yet nor do I
expect one.

>
> Cheerio
>

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Received on Tue Mar 16 00:15:02 2010