[ubuntu-studio-devel] ALSA firewire drivers

[Takashi Sakamoto]

Hi all,

I'm a developer who works for the drivers. It's my pleasure to give the 
package. I really appreciate to his work for packaging, thanks to David.

Well, I want to add some supplemental information.

1. Included drivers
Currently, three drivers are newly available by the package.
  - snd-fireworks for Fireworks based devices
  - snd-bebob for BeBoB based devices
  - snd-oxfw for OXFW based devices

If you want to confirm whether they support your device or not, please 
refer to these actual codes. These codes includes device entries and I 
added comments for users to confirm easily.

https://github.com/takaswie/snd-firewire-improve/blob/master/sound/firewire/bebob/bebob.c
https://github.com/takaswie/snd-firewire-improve/blob/master/sound/firewire/fireworks/fireworks.c
https://github.com/takaswie/snd-firewire-improve/blob/master/sound/firewire/oxfw/oxfw.c

For example, bebob.c includes comments of '/* PreSonus, FIREPOD/FP10 
*/'. Then you can confirm your PreSonus FP10 is supported by snd-bebob.

There are some comments without actual entries. If you have the device, 
please inform to me. I'll tell you the way to look for IDs for your 
device and add it to the codes.

As David mentioned, the package is daily build. This means that when I 
modify the source, the package is re-built and newly available.


2.Current status
For snd-fireworks and snd-bebob, the package includes the same codes as 
I've already posted to alsa-devel.

[alsa-devel] [PATCH 00/49 v4] Enhancement for support of Firewire devices
http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2014-April/075841.html

This series of patch is currently under reviewing.

I didn't post the codes for snd-oxfw because the driver has a regression 
against snd-firewire-speakers. The snd-oxfw is successor of 
snd-firewire-speakers.


3.Internal mixer control
The drivers are developed to focus on 'streaming'. This means just to 
handle PCM/MIDI substreams. So they have no functionality to control 
internal mixers. Users should use ffado-dbus-server/ffado-mixer for this 
purpose.

I'm also a developer of FFADO. Last year, I worked much mainly for 
enhancement of mixer control support for Fireworks/BeBoB. Current trunk 
has support or improvement for:
  - PreSonus FIREBOX, Inspire1394, FP10 (former known as FIREPOD)
  - M-Audio Ozonic, Solo, Audiophile, Firewire 410, Firewire 1814, 
ProjectMix I/O
  - Yamaha GO44, GO46
  - Echo Audio AudioFire2/4/8/Pre8/12

But current package in Ubuntu repository is a bit old.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libffado

So if you want to use the new features, please build it from source.
http://subversion.ffado.org/wiki/InstallingFfadoFromSource


3.jackd with firewire backend is still available
Even if you install the drivers, jackd with firewire backend is still 
available. I designed the drivers not to obstruct libffado.


4.bug reporting
Any reports are preferrable. Then please report output from these procfs 
node additionally.
/proc/asound/cardX/firewire/*
(X means ID for your device.)

If you have some bugs, please report syslog additionally.


Thanks

Takashi Sakamoto
o-takashi at sakamocchi.jp

(May 02 2014 22:01), David Henningsson wrote:
> Hi studio people,
>
> Takashi Sakamoto has been working, for a while, to make proper ALSA
> drivers for Firewire, so we don't have to rely on libffado for Firewire
> support - Firewire sound cards will just work like any other sound card,
> e g USB.
>
> I've set up automatic builds of his work (for Ubuntu 14.04), and you can
> find and test the result here:
>
> https://launchpad.net/~diwic/+archive/snd-firewire-improve
>
> I'm sure he will welcome more testing of his drivers while they make
> their way upstream.
>
> It's currently known that they don't work with Audacity and many cards
> will not work with PulseAudio either (without special configuration in
> PulseAudio). Stuff like this requires work across the stack, so not
> everything can or should be fixed in the drivers.
>
> Nevertheless it would be interesting to know what other common
> applications work and don't work with his new drivers.
>
> So if you have an old (or new!) firewire sound card in your shelf, feel
> free to grab it and plug it in. Happy testing!