From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Charbonnel Subject: Re: HDSP 9632 driver and expansion cards Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 22:23:53 +0100 Sender: alsa-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <400EEDE9.80208@undata.org> References: <1074650862.6893.10.camel@rivendell.home.local> <400E74F6.1040803@undata.org> <02f701c3e04e$1f39d2e0$5d40a8c0@FRiskMan.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <02f701c3e04e$1f39d2e0$5d40a8c0@FRiskMan.com> Errors-To: alsa-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , List-Archive: To: Ed Wildgoose Cc: alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net List-Id: alsa-devel@alsa-project.org Ed Wildgoose wrote : >>Florin Andrei wrote : >> >>>Anyone using the latest RME HDSP 9632 driver in ALSA, while also using >>>the expansion cards? I mean, the newer AI4S-192 and/or AO4S-192 which >>>are required to get the 192kHz sampling on all analogs. >>> >>>Do the latest expansion cards (192kHz) work with the latest ALSA driver? >>> >>>In general, are the ALSA drivers ready to support any kind of expansion >>>cards on the HDSP 9632 / HDSP 9652? >>> >> >>Hi Florin, >> >>Support is there, but as of today and as far as I know this is untested. >> >>Thomas > > > Hi Thomas, > > Thanks so much for your RME 9632 driver and your fantastic mixer utilities. > I have a 9632 now and also the 4 port analogue expansion card. > > I haven't had time to try and get any sound out of it yet! However, it is > detected correctly in the mixer, and the driver thinks that there are 4 > extra channels. I need to get some jack socket convertors to get some sound > out, but will let you know. > Please do so, thanks. > I have a few usability comments with regards to the drivers that I would > like to share, will draft a fuller email later, but basically I am using it > as a hifi input for music, nothing else, but I'm frequently getting very > jittery & broken up audio (guessing that the default alsa buffer/latency > size is really tiny?) and not many input formats are supported which means > that the plug driver is usually required (not a huge problem though). It > would also be extremely nice to have some simple mixer controls available > for compatibility with older/simpler apps. In particular a fake master > mixer which reduces all channels would be extremely desirable (I'm hoping to > use the card for a surround sound output) > For the "jittery & broken up audio" problem, are you running an optimized audio kernel (preempt + lowlatency patched) ? How frequent is frequently ? Can you find any relation between the audio problems and external factors (disk access, heavy load, etc...) ? For the supported formats, this is a limitation of the hardware. Plughw is indeed your friend here, or try to find a player that handles this natively (alsaplayer ?). For the mixer controls : there were some in the past, but I removed them because I couldn't find any clean solution to deal with them while changing speed mode (because their number changes at this occasion). Maybe Jaroslav or Takashi have an idea on the subject ? When I last worked on this, the only solution I could find would have been to mess up with a semaphore held by the alsa-lib layer and although it would have worked, it would have been plain ugly. Anyway I plan a massive redesign of the way the driver and userspace apps interact regarding the matrix mixer, mostly to enable several application to access the mixer at the same time in a cooperative way (how about an alsaseq client or a ladspa plugin accessing the matrix with the changes reflected in hdspmixer ? :). This is the prerequisite of some work I want to do with jack and ardour to handle hardware monitoring in a better way. I could indeed add a master volume control at this occasion. > Thanks for your work on this, it is very much appreciated. > Thanks for your kind words, they're very much appreciated these days... Thomas ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn