8 Nov
2009
8 Nov
'09
3:49 a.m.
On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 11:04:15AM +0100, Arnold Krille wrote:
On Friday 06 November 2009 10:28:26 Florian Faber
wrote:
But there are no alternatives. USB1 is to slow, USB2 has no (widely accepted)
standard. USB3 has no devices yet, don't know whether it defines a standard.
Well, yes, of course there are alternatives: run Windoze, which is what these bastards
want to force us to do, isn't it?
*sigh*. Haven't we already gone through this struggle before, with 3D video cards, and
WiFi cards, and webcams, and input devices, just about every possible peice of computer
hardware? In the last decade that I've been using Linux, I've seen this same
problem come up again and again... and also seen it solved again and again.
It's getting tedious, but, at the same time, it's not a new problem and since
it's been solved before, there are ready answers and a suite of different solutions
that have worked before, including: pressuring the manufacturers, reverse-engineering,
NDIS/Wine, negotiations and payments, etc.
Unless of course some enterprising hardware engineer wants to create an open-source,
fully-documented USB2 audio interface, knowing they'd have a ready market in the
couple dozen or so LAU members.
Hmm, come to think of it, that might be an interesting project. Take apart a commercial,
unsupported USB2 audio interface, see what chips they're using, look up the data
sheets for those chips, and design an interface along similar lines, but open up the USB2
interface so that a Linux GPL driver can be written for it. These things can't be
marvels of engineering amazingness: they're cheap, mass-produced products. Just off
the top I'd be willing to bet that all of them use the exact same chipset, which does
all the work anyway, and the products are different mostly in packaging and branding.
the great
advantage of firewire devices from my POV is that you can
easily share your device between your studio PC and your mobile kit for
on-location recording. the only alternative to that kind of flexibility
is an RME [multi|digi]face with both a hdsp expresscard and a pcie card.
which is in an entirely different price bracket.
Just in case you haven't
noticed: Firewire is dead. The number of
devices with a firewire port is decreasing rapidly.
I wouldn't advocate Firewire devices anymore for new buyers. PCCards are usually limited to one per laptop.
Firewire is the only thing where you can have high number of channels and even
more then one device on one connection. And work for supporting almost all
devices except for Motu is quite advanced thanks to support from the vendors.
The only alternative for higher channel counts is a pci(-express) device from
rme. And these don't work with laptops...
Have fun,
Arnold