21 Dec
2006
21 Dec
'06
9:47 p.m.
On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 16:47 -0800, Ken Restivo wrote:
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That's bleak.
I bought a Mac Mini to do audio on. It's got the dreaded hda_intel chip.
But with kernel 2.4.18 it works fine. Fine meaning: there's still some xruns, but not
enough to slow me down too much.
Right now I haven't been able to get it to actually *record*, but since I'm
mostly doing all-digital stuff right now it hasn't gotten in my way. Yet.
I suppose if I do any serious work I'll get one of those firewire audio external
boxes like the FA-66, which aren't too expensive last I checked.
no experience with any one HDA setup can be transferred to any other.
the intel HDA specification is barely a real specification. it has left
enough "wiggle room" that the drivers for "HDA" are actually a
hodge-podge (technical term) of random fixes to patch up areas left
insufficiently defined.
there are dozens of HDA configurations - each one of them is unique. and
tomorrow, when apple, or HP, or sony or fujitsu or whoever release a new
laptop, there will likely be one more.
this works on linux because the h/w manufacturer hacks the base driver
supplied by intel and includes it in the windows kit shipped with the
laptop/desktop. on linux, they do nothing (of course) so it comes down
to the user finding out that it doesn't work, and having the
guts/know-how to track down what register mappings have been changed,
which pinouts have been reordered and then trying to get a new quirk/fix
added to the HDA driver.
its deeply pathetic, and i think that intel should be absolutely ashamed
of what they have done. even creative did a better job than this,
without even trying to: the SB16 was a standard; not very good, but a
standard nevertheless.
--p