[LAD] TASCAM US-1641

[Adrian Knoth]

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. ;)

> 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?

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

   * Which streaming format is used?


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.

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.

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


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. ;)


Cheerio

-- 
mail: adi at thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP/GPG: key via keyserver

USER, n.: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."