[LAU] open hw soundcard (was Re: status usb2 for sound)

[Ken Restivo]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:32:40PM +0100, Karl Hammar wrote:
> Karl Hammar:
> > Hans Wilmsers:
> ...
> > > I could do parts of:
> > > 1) testing OSC on ARM/embedded Linux
> > >    (Don't know whether I could test netjack - I have no experience with
> > > that)
> > 
> > Great! OSC [1] looks interesting, please report back.
> > I think I will play a little with it also, but for a control 
> > application.
> ...
> 
> I took a deeper look into OSC.
> 
> It should be no problem implementing it, it simply is a on-the-wire 
> format and it should be useful since some interesting programs uses it.
> 
> But, other than that it look uninteresting, I could just as well
> 
>  - $ cat | ssh host "cat > file; notify_program"
>  - use snmp
> 
> and the main drawback with it is that it is an one-way communication
> and it "only" transfers ints, single presision floats, strings and 
> timestamps.
> 
> One problem though, one has to define the semantics och the data send.
> 
> - Can someone point to some wellrocognized doc for that?
> 
> - What are the conventions?
> 

OSC info, including specs, is here:
http://opensoundcontrol.org/

I suggested it for control/status data, i.e. to configure the sound card, choose sample rates and channel configurations, etc. It's used by some Linux softsynths to communicate with their GUIs.

I would not suggest OSC for shuffling ADC data back and forth. For that, either NetJack or some lightweight homegrown int/longint-based protocol would be better.

I am very excited to see so much progress on this. That ATMEL dev board also seems like a fast way to get something up and running.

-ken