Thank you so much for the those words! ;=) As you saw at the links, the first goal is to get the source from Akai... even a beta. If that fails, we are gonna try and develop a whole OS. Thanks again Marc-Olivier Barre wrote:

Well, everybody's telling me that Akai's OS is something else. Realtime stuff and 2 or 3 engines and DSPs to manage. Besides, we have to support akai's native file formats, like PROGRAM, MULTI and Sequence. I really don't know why... I'm just hearing what everybody says. You think it shouldn't be that hard to port Linux and develop the effects and stuff, and to support Akai's native format? Would you give me some arguments and reasons? Thanks for the input! Lee Revell wrote:

James Courtier-Dutton wrote: Is the kit totally necesary? Can we build an emulator out of the service manual? An emulator would be a natural step, i think. In any case, I have some questions about a post a friend of mine made to the forum where it all started. You can check it for yourself at: http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=54825&start=60 but I will paste it here. Can anybody comment on it?

At 21:02 +0700 27/7/06, Patrick Shirkey wrote: of course linux can be packaged as a small-footprint real-time operating system. it has been that way from the very beginning. distro's came second to the own-rolled. never forget that! distro's are not supposed to be embedded, or they wouldn't be distro's: they'd be "some device X, being used". the hardware wrapping embedded linux (or any similar kernel) *is* the distro. -- ; Jay Vaughan

i assure you, linux performs on par with "other public-domain RTOSes" in the real-time department, in the right hands .. like all good instruments .. -- ; Jay Vaughan

On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:02, Renich Bon Ćirić wrote: Finally, a question is raised that I can make a comment on, based on 55 years of chasing electrons around for a living. Yeah, I'm getting to be a chrotchety old coot in my retirement years. :) After spending about half an hour perusing that pdf, I can, as a C.E.T. who has carved some code in a past life, say that the answer is a rather resounding no. There is nowhere near enough there, without chaseing each and every chip maker down and somehow acquiring all the interface requirements. Properly specified, like we used to be able to get chip info back in the 80's, I'd imagine that pdf would have to grow another thousand pages. I can't help but echo the reticence already expressed here regarding the proprietary nature of this device. If Akai wants to make money on the hardware by selling it to die-hard linux professional audio people, either they do their own OS for it and charge whatever they think the whole package is worth, or open the device up just as if it was a GPL piece of software and be prepared to sell the hardware for a decent price after assuming a sales level of x many units. I certainly don't see 3 grand worth of parts, pcb, drive and silk screening there, far less in fact. I suspect that there will be very little support offered by the average liux coder if he knows the patches he writes will disappear into something that is not going to be open-sourced. From my viewpoint, Akai's legal dept., who is obviously controlling what Renich can say, will see to it that the product fails. Its up to Akai to make a liar out of me. If they would join the open source camp by supporting the coders with all the info, publicly available to any and all, that they will need to write the drivers this device will need, distribute this OS under the GPL with a server that lets *anyone* download it for free, or on a mailable cd for a couple of bucks american, while selling the hardware for $1000 to $1500, and watch the hardware sales blossum like our wild flowers along the interstate. Thats because the unshackled coders will write stuff that stretches the limits of what the hardware can do, just to see if they can. Its rather like climbing Mt. Everest, because its there. :) -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

On 7/28/06, Renich Bon Ćirić <renich(a)woralelandia.com> wrote: you mean you are willing to try and find some one to write you a new OS for free? How much of the coding will you do? How about you just buy a little rack mount pc and an mpd16? then you have the pads from the mpc and a whole lot more processing power. You could put a nice interface in the same little rack box and then you'll have less random stuff to carry to a gig and might actually build a better intergrated solution that everyone can use. You might get a lot more support from everyone then. Ebay might be a good place for your mpc. Loki

On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 13:29 -0500, Renich Bon Ćirić wrote: -<sinp> -- Renich! There is one thing you did not tell us. What is it that is so annoying? Is it crashing or is it doing the wrong thing or is it perhaps stopping to respond within reasonable time? Others have said that it is very likely that Akai have bought their RT-OS from a third-party vendor. So they are under an NDA and there is no legal way for them to show the source for that. OTOH, the thing works mostly like you want it to, yes? So it might be a small adjustment that is needed rather than a major rewrite, no? Like Gene says, you'll have to get thru to a senior engineer and file a proper bug-report. This should include a method for provoking the bug (as in: When I do like this, after having done that, it always ...) Most probably it is a thinko on behalf of Akai regarding the application on top of the RT-OS. Reasonably easily fixed by one guy at Akai.

On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 23:48 -0500, Renich Bon Ćirić wrote: Ehh ... I looked around a little in: Exchange tips and tricks for the Akai MPC4000 26864 Posts, 3600 Threads Is that the one? There is no search function in the forum, and quite a low noise to content ratio. I can understand if akai is not willing to manually browse through it all ... I found one report of a "missing file", but nobody chiming in with a "me too", so there is no pattern there to follow. On the surface, that report could also look like a "dog ate my homework" :-) What developers, akai? Open source advocates? And again, what bug? Saying "a great number" is hard to follow up on. In the forum I see many suggestions that could be compiled into some kind of wish-list. I would recommend that those people pick up some abondoned PC from the garbage bin, install Linux, and then join us here. The chance of akai open sourcing their application is next to nil. They would (and should) consider their knowhow to be trade-secrets, which means that everything would be under an NDA. Furthermore, it would also be riddled with licensed patents, so of very little use to us. That the OS (or application) is not being updated is not nescesarily a bad thing. It might be so that the real bugs have been ironed out and compliance with specifications have been achieved. For that matter, the OS for my hardware synthesizer haven't been updated since late '84 (or was that early '85?) The OS misinterpreted an "all-notes-off" to be a "system-reset", which was the end of fun with inter-operability. Despite that there are no further updates after that, I am still happy and I use it every day :-) It's a $3K unit! If they have managed to ship, say 3000 units, they would be close to (or beyond) break-even. My guess is, from an accountants POV, that they are successful. High profiled synthesizers are like Lambourginis and Ferraris: Everybody knows what they look like and what they can do, but only the few select can afford to actually own one and use it. Talking of which: Porshe still haven't fixed the bug in the back-suspension of the 911 Carrera ... () --

On Thursday 27 July 2006 19:34, Renich Bon Ćirić wrote: [...] First one has to open an effective channel of communications in order to get close enough to somebody who would know what an NDA is, something I've tried several times over the decades with only one success, usually you find somebody co-operative who makes you think you might have a chance at getting some assistance, but 3 days later you call back to confirm a detail and that person has been fired or transferred out of that dept., primarily one suspects for the simple act of getting too close to the customer. However, Renish, if you are not representing Akai in this, then why the secrecy? Akai is going to want to know why you want to know all this stuff, and just to play cma, I wouldn't even try to put a coat of varnish on it. Tell them straight up that the hardware is great but the OS sucks and you want to fix it, writing it from scratch in a clean room scenario, meaning you will never see a copy of their src, just the specs that writing to such and such an address writes to what register, and what every bit or byte written makes it do what. AIUI, then you can GPL it, or if no GPL'd libraries or anything like that is used, you could make it proprietary. But we both know you'll get a lot more help if its open and GPL'd. And, just to get some stability, for every register you write to using their specs for whats written vs whats supposed to happen, I'd take the time to verify that the results you get and their specs agree. I've found more than one bug, a couple of them fairly serious, in the hardware using that exersize it all technique. I expect you will do whatever and however you want in any event, so I'll go away and see if my rocking chair still rocks, or something. :) -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

On Friday 28 July 2006 02:03, Loki Davison wrote: [...] Well, in fact I mowed the front yard, weeded my little garden, changed the beetle bags, stood on the front deck taking a pix about every 2 minutes while some sort of a lilly the missus has in a big pot sitting on the deck railing, a lilly she has had since long before me, opened up 4 blooms yesterday morning. And I finally got through to the cvs server and updated my milling machines emc2 driver program, but now it won't run, something needs updated in the stepper_inch.ini file according to the error message as it dies. Fur a retired old coot, I was busy and never did find the rocker, I think its in the front room someplace. :-) Rockers are for old farts, and while I'm 71, my mind hasn't quite gotten to the sit down and die stage. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

On Friday 28 July 2006 14:24, Renich Bon Ćirić wrote: [...] Thanks. Its YOUR project, YOU should set the license, and Akai can help, or not help. Getting collaborators is going to be 10,000% easier if its GPL from the gitgo. And I still haven't found that rocker to sit in. Amanda and emc2 are taking too much of my time. I build the daily snapshot of amanda and install it for the upcoming nights backup run, and screech like a canary if it upchucks, which it did last night. And emc2 seems to have lost its path through the parport & doesn't run the motors with the most recent build. And somewhere, I have to find the time to update 2 machines to FC5 or kubuntu-6.06 here, this one from a considerably hacked up FC2, and my firewall box from a heavily updated RH7.3, whose support officially ends Dec 31. I'll find that rocker someday & then you'll likely not have to put up with me anymore. Till, then, we'll just keep on trying to 'git-r-done'. :) -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 08:46:27PM +0200, Jay Vaughan wrote: Let me add one more voice. At my (current) work we develop space telecom equipment, all of it these days consisting of one or more dedicated interface cards plugged into a Linux PC. All processing is done in software. Sample frequencies are up to a few MHz, and latency requirements more demanding than for any audio work. Five years ago we used RTAI for the critical work. It was a lot of pain. Since then everything runs on standard Linux kernels optimised a bit for real-time. These days that means it's just a stock 2.6 kernel compiled with the right configuration. -- FA Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa.

Ismael Cortes wrote: LOL. Thanks for the links! I will read some on the topic.

Well, you are talking about the company. I think of us, users. I am not the only one who bought it. I think that the integration it provides it's great, but the OS has some bugs that need attention... the company is releasing new versions every 1.5 years... I am thinking in the users. There are a lot, and they're interested. Technology, for me, is here to help humanity. That's why I'm interested. I know we could develop our own software and buy the hardware separately. But, then again, this is not the case. It's for the users... that's all I can say. carmen wrote:

Agreed. There are so many embeded linux projects out there, it would be like writing one's own printf function when there's glibc here to do the job... Moreover, it would allow you to take avantage of a lot of application/file formats/whatever that is working already pretty well on a linux audio workstation. Looking at the specs, the MPC 4000 seems like a big pack of knobs, LCDs, LEDs, and audio circuits. it's up to the OS to do some music with it. Are you sure you want to go on the crusade of reinventing not only the wheel, but also the whole stuff around it ? ________________ Marc-Olivier Barre, Kinoko en Orbite.

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 18:00 -0500, Renich Bon Ćirić wrote: Just port Linux to it then develop the support for the native file systems/formats/etc. MUCH less work than writing your own OS. (BTW top posting is considered bad form on this list) It sounds like you're responding to user requests of some kind - do you have a link? What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Lee

On 7/27/06, Renich Bon Ćirić &lt;renich(a)woralelandia.com&gt; wrote: Nope, your post was in the right order this time :-) Your answer has to be after the previous email in the conversation. Just like when you write, the story goes from the top of the page to the bottom. cheers, ______________ Marc-Olivier Barre, Kinoko en Orbite.

What is top Posting? Well anyway, I do have some links. # The forum where it all started http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=54825 # The site I've established to make this happen. http://www.woralelandia.com/openmpc I could use all the help available. Thank you so much for all your support and advice. I will seriously consider Linux if we're gonna develop an OS. Marc-Olivier Barre wrote:

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 06:41:13PM -0400, Lee Revell wrote: One could take the point of view that linux is just the kernel, not the entire OS. Or one could, for the fun on if, port eCos. I worked on a project that used that on some audio cards. eCos supports that CPU already as well. -- Joshua D. Boyd jdboyd(a)jdboyd.net http://www.jdboyd.net/ http://www.joshuaboyd.org/