[ardour-users] A decent sound card for Ardour

[Paul Davis]

On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 19:30 +0000, John Emmas wrote:

> Immense thanks.  The card's firmware is the last thing I would have
> suspected.  Maybe I'll need to become more savvy about this kind of thing
> but I can honestly say that in 20 years of using DOS & Windows, I've never
> once encountered a show-stopping firmware problem like this.

And why do you suppose that is? Its because the h/w manufacturer that
made the f/w also wrote and distributed the driver.

I strongly suggest that you write to RME to note the issue. They *have*
sent me updates for the new firmware, but they did so only *after* some
linux users had an issue with it, and they offer absolutely no
motivation to do the work required. RME have made a nice profit from the
existence of Linux drivers, but in their website and their attitude, we
are 3rd class citizens who don't get new drivers or info on time, and we
are basically on their own. In exchange for the drivers, a couple of
people got hardware worth a few hundred dollars to RME. That was nice,
but since then, they have basically washed their hands of the Linux
community. I am sure that the pathetic roasting people gave them over
the Fireface didn't entirely encourage them to keep us in mind. The next
time they release new firmware, you can be sure it will break again
until I or someone else bugs them and they say "oh yeah, we forgot about
the linux drivers again".

> There's only one minor problem left to solve.... I've noticed that, before
> I can play any sounds, I need to run hdspmixer at least once.  Having
> run it once, I can close it down.  I'm thinking I might make it start up
> automatically but is there a "background" setting where it can be
> launched without being physically displayed on screen?

At this point in time, there is not. As I mentioned several days ago,
this was a change in the driver architecture that I didn't really
approve of, but it was done and accepted into ALSA anyway.

--p