["My name is Robert and I'm very much interested in working on ALSA Project with you. I primarily would like to develop a new driver for a souncard, which is not supported by ALSA yet, perhaps some USB stuff from Midiman?"]
Gday Robert, I'm not involved in Alsa development at all, but I do have a suggestion for you on what you could work on. My friend is a professional music producer and currently uses Windows 2000 and programs such as CalkWalk, CuBase, ReCycle, SoundForge, etc. He would like to start using Linux and unfortunately there is only one piece of hardware that he has that is currently unsupported in Linux. This unsupported piece of hardware is what is holding him back from switching to Linux. That piece of hardware is the Emagic Unitor8/AMT8 Mk II which connects to his computer via the serial port. The Emagic Unitor8/AMT8 Mk II is capable of connecting to computers via USB, RS232 and RS422, and looks like this: http://www.emagic.de/products/hw/unitor/index.php?lang=EN I emailed Emagic asking about Linux drivers for it and they referred me to this page: http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~sbartels/unitor/ Unfortunately, that page hasn't been updated since the May 28, 2000. I've emailed all 3 of the developers and have not heard back from them. Their first working version of the alsa driver had only support for USB which is not good as my friend has the serial port version. I had a search through the alsa-devel archives and found that Manush Dodunekov had developed a patch for alsa 0.9.0rc1 which was a serial driver for unitor8/amt8: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1510131 That version of alsa 0.9.0rc1 is almost a year old. Also it appears that Manush Dodunekov hasn't done any more work on that driver. Emagic has provided complete documentation (currently available only in German language) of the serial/USB communication protocol of the Unitor8/AMT8 both MkI and II. This info can be found on this page: http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~sbartels/unitor/ direct link here: http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~sbartels/unitor/unitor8_doc.txt However that page is in a Unix text format ans if you try using and web translation, you will lose the formatting. I've downloaded the file and converted it into a DOS text format and this will work with web translation. A good web translation is at: http://intertran.tranexp.com/ scroll to the bottom and for step 1 choose "German" "English". For step 2 paste this url in: http://wilber.pointclark.net/alsa/unitor8amt8mkimkiiserialusbdoc.htm and for step 3 hit the "Translate" button. So what could you work on? My suggestions are: - Update Manush Dodunekov's alsa 0.9.0rc1 patch so it now works and applies to the latest alsa version alsa-0.9.2. - Merge the USB driver found on this webpage http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~sbartels/unitor/ with Manush Dodunekov driver. - Make sure the driver fully implements and is compliant to the official complete documentation of the serial/USB communication protocol of the Unitor8/AMT8 both MkI and II. Manush Dodunekov serial driver does not yet support send-to-all output port and catch-all input port (port 0 in the windows driver). - Investigate different driver models and implementations re: [" http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1510131 The driver is heavily based on serial-u16550.c, which may be the wrong concept. A more correct concept seems to have a generic-serial.c and generic-usb.c, which only implement a communication channel. The interface drivers could then load&use them and only implement their own init/port-select/whatever dialect. Lots of MIDI interfaces come with both USB and serial connectors nowadays. Any thoughts on this? http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1515201 Ok. I'll give a userspace unitor8-driver a try then. "] What do you think? Also which country are you in? In your country it might be legal to reverse engineer. Hoo Roo, Wilber ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: The Definitive IT and Networking Event. Be There! NetWorld+Interop Las Vegas 2003 -- Register today! http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?keyn0001en _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
