5 May
2017
5 May
'17
12:15 p.m.
Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net> writes:
On Fri, 05 May 2017 09:42:01 +0200, David Kastrup
wrote:
Sigh. Alsa already offers fairly generic access to soundcard mixers
with the alsamixer and amixer commands.
Digital control surfaces are everywhere and
it's a bit strange that in
the Linux DAW world they cannot make it through to the hardware.
Hi,
you could mix a song using a control surface and/or automation of
software such as Ardour. There unlikely is a reason to use a control
surface and/or automation for hardware monitoring, hdspmixer allows to
save and load as much presets as you want, 8 presets are available even
without loading.
A lot of Linux hardware issues are caused by the missing support of
the hardware vendors. However, what you want to get is already an
issue, due to the differences of audio interfaces, even if the vendor
should support Linux. You expect the recording software to use the audio
interface's mixer
"like this", but if "like this" shouldn't be supported to
"fallback to
that".
An AIO solution, bundled software + hardware could provide what you
want to get, in a professional way. I doubt this would work very good,
if software needs to care about what ever audio interface should be
connected.
Sigh. I propose precisely that end user software should _not_ need to
care about whatever audio interface is connected. That's one of the
points of Jack and ALSA. Standard APIs to functionality that might be
implemented differently at the driver end.
A compromise might be to control the DAW mixer and
independently to
control the hardware mixer, too, IOW something like hdspmixer
controlable by MIDI events. Do a lot of people need it?
Not enough if _every_ _single_ soundcard needs its own mixer application
coded from scratch. If one creates a common useful Jack API for gained
connections that one mixer application can work with, there will
certainly be enough need to provide a Midi controlled mixer capable of
using hardware mixing where available.
If so, is somebody willing to add MIDI to e.g.
hdspmixer?
The RME Hammerfall is dated (not that it doesn't hold its own pretty
well but you still need to hook it up with preamps and then stuff starts
getting bulky), and hdspmixer is pretty cumbersome to use. I'd rather
whip up a few Ardour mixers for the connections I actually need and have
them delegate to hardware where feasible.
EQs, Reverb and delay would be nice for the hardware
monitoring, too
and indeed, proprietary software for a lot of audio interfaces provide
this.
For hardware monitoring? Hardly. At driver level? Maybe. But then
it's not fundamentally different to Jack plugins.
--
David Kastrup