I got myself one of the PlusDeck units last summer after having received some documentation from the product team about their serial control protocol, so I figured that I'd have some chance at actually making a recording program for Linux for it. The impetus for all of this is a stack of 300 or so audio tapes that my fiancee has, which contain mostly south Indian music recordings, including training lessons, from her late teacher T Viswanathan. Some of those probably don't exist anywhere else at this point, so putting them to digital would be a good thing (tm). Anyway, I have 2 goals. First, the practical, get all this music to digital dumps (flac in ogg containers for metadata seems to be the best bet). I'm trying to figure out the best ways to do this on a Mandriva Linux 2.6.12 kernel (on an AMD64 3000+ processor running 32bit, with Via onboard sound.) The PlusDeck just ends up being an input line jack into the sound card. I've run some tests with ecasound both straight off the alsa device, and through ecasound to jackd (both as root to get real time). It is hard to tell if I'm doing better with jackd or not, but I'm making some long recordings and letting my musical fiancee tell me if she can hear the difference. :) Given that I've got the serial protocol sorted out, it seems like the practical approach is just a command line ripper that will start up all the right audio bits, start the tape, and stop when the tape gets to the end. Full automation is what I'm looking to create. Is ecasound a good option here? How much better will ecasound + jackd be over ecasound at realtime? Would building some kind of plusdeck control plugin for another recording program make more sense? If so, which one? Second, I'd like to turn whatever I learn during the practical phase into a reasonable open source Linux tool for using the PlusDeck. I'd be a bit unnerved if that required that I set up all jack & ecasound bits, as well as kicked them off as setuid root, but better options are failing me at the moment. Any advice, ideas, suggestions, questions... even flames would be welcomed. I've spent a bit of time learning more than I ever thought I'd end up knowing about Linux audio already, and know I have a whole lot more I need to learn still. Thanks in advance, -Sean -- __________________________________________________________________ Sean Dague Mid-Hudson Valley sean at dague dot net Linux Users Group http://dague.net http://mhvlug.org There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down. __________________________________________________________________