27 Jun
2003
27 Jun
'03
2:22 p.m.
On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 01:39:15PM +0100, Daniel James wrote:
I made a point of mentioning MOTU hardware as it seems
popular amongst
mac/windows studio owners, but in the Linux audio community the M
Audio and RME cards seem to be favoured - probably because of a more
sympathetic attitude to driver development from those companies.
Probably. But to give credit where credit is due:
it should be mentioned that much (all?) of the praise
given to Maudio for being open-source friendly should actually be
given to ICE (now owned by VIA). It's the ICE1712, aka Envy24, that
allows the Delta series to work so well with linux. And we wouldn't
have alsa drivers if ICE hadn't released specs.
What Maudio deserves credit for is something that is very important,
but which we'd be able to take for granted in a better world:
They released products based on widespread chipsets without hiding
essential functionality in proprietary add-on crap. And they've
complied with standards (usb audio/midi), more or less - at least,
the generic alsa usbaudio drivers work with many Maudio products.
It's much the same situation as we had with the many cards based on the
CS 423x series, to pick an example. Crystal Semiconductor publically
released all the necessary info to write drivers for these cards,
without restrictions. As a result, many manufacturers got linux drivers
for their products, without any effort or expenditure, possibly without even
being aware of it :)
RME, on the other hand, have been directly supportive, providing
hardware to alsa developers at times.
--
Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com