31 Aug
2014
31 Aug
'14
7:03 p.m.
On Sun, 2014-08-31 at 09:29 -0700, Len Ovens wrote:
Just a quick note about DIY HW. It is not generally
cheaper than buying
the same capability made by someone else. There are premade solutions out
there, but they are not in the range of a lot of linux musicians.
In May 2011 I bought a RME HDSPe AIO for 478 € and a ADA8000 for 169 €.
I doubt that DIY is nearly that inexpensive when providing the same
quality. It likely would be much more expensive. At least for this PCIe
card RME is willing to help ALSA driver coders, the only problem is,
that when reporting the issues with this card, nobody seriously is
interested in the bug reports and feature requests. Assumed it would be
possible to build an audio interface for less costs, then there still
would be the same issue for the ALSA driver as we already have now.
Somebody with the knowledge, time and willing to write the driver is
needed. Assumed you should have the needed abilities to write drivers,
consider to that for existing sound cards instead of thinking to build
the hardware too.
Most of us are looking for those ~$500 solutions. That
is, we expect to
get 4 to 8 i/os with mic pres for $500 or so. That is why ADAT looks good
to us. The Audio Science 8 i/o PCIe card is just over $1k but just has
line in (my D66 is line level too BTW) so then you need mic pres. Most of
us have supplied these with a mixer of some sort.
Laptops are another issue, but for PC mobos the PCIe solution that
already does exist is around 478 € + 169 € = 647 €.
$ hdspmixer
[snip]
Looking for RME cards:
Card 0: RME AIO S/N 0x579bcc at 0xfddf0000, irq 18
RME AIO found!
[snip]
$ hdspconf
[snip]
Looking for HDSP cards :
Card 0 : RME AIO S/N 0x579bcc at 0xfddf0000, irq 18
[snip]
No Hammerfall DSP card found.
So what ever I do wrong, only 2 of the 8 ADAT channels are available by
the jackd ports and I don't know how to get all the features that are
provided by the Windows driver. Not that I'm a Windows user, but to test
the sound card during warranty period, I tested it with a Windows
install. Already TotalMix is completely different for Windows, than for
Linux. There are also not the latency/xrun issues on the same machine as
for Linux. Perhaps somebody would car about such issues, if somebody
else but me would report it, since I received a mail off-list with the
warning to ban me from Linux audio mailing lists.
Whitewashing and ignoring issues seems to be more pleasant, than talking
about hard facts.