[LAD] TASCAM US-1641

[Jan Depner]

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
>