[LAU] The pain of Firewire audio hardware

[S. Massy]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 10:45:03AM +0100, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
> [Long, partly rant-ish, pouring OT email, so if you want feel free to skip]
> 
> This morning I got the most polite, kind email from a person who
> knows me as "the linux guy" and saw me use linux with audio a lot,
> candidly asking "I need your help: were can I get drivers for my RME
> Fireface 400" for Ubunto?
> Now, I went writing the usual leitmotiv of explaining the situation
> with Firewire hardware on linux, the fact that most audio hardware
> makers suck at linux, the great FFADO effort, etc. etc. What will he
> think? I don't know.
Don't have anything very helpful to add, except join my voice to yours.
I once went into a recording project situation with someone wanting me
to set up their ubuntu system for audio work (knowing I used linux
exclusively). Well, I pointed out all the great packages like ardour and
rosegarden, and so forth, of course, but their soundcard (Focusrite
Saffire pro) didn't work out of the box. It eventually did, but it
involved, iirc, switching stack and modifying and recompiling the code
just to add the vendor id of the specific card. While I was
knowledgeable enough to do these things, I'm pretty sure it put that
person off linux-audio for life. :(

A binary driver, if it worked at all, probably wouldn't be much good for
low-latency work, unless the manufacturer were willing to allocate
serious devel time.

Cheers,
S.M.