>--*-- What is the best-supported *Pro Audio* device in terms of solid ALSA dri >ver support? Not interested in Sound Blasters and chips on the motherboard -- > something along the lines of the Echo, M-Audio, or RME products. But the ALS >A drivers need to be stable -- and need to fully support the capabilities of h >e respective device (i.e., on-board DSP, MIDI, or whatever).
the echo drivers are extremely new, and largely untested at this point. they may even be incomplete. the m-audio drivers are probably the oldest, and have been widely tested. i don't know how well they support the latest incarnations of the ice17XX chipsets. there is also a good control application for these interfaces. the rme drivers (i was the initial primary author) are stable and complete for the original hammerfall series. they have been evolving for the hdsp series. slightly older hdsp cards will work well, as do newer kernels when used with the pcmcia interfaces (since this tends to require up-to-date support for CardBus devices in the kernel as much as anything specifically related to the hdsp). as with many companies, rme unfortunately does not keep us 100% up to date on what they are doing with their interfaces, and so as they change the firmware it turns out that we lag behind, typically by a few weeks. thomas charbonnel has done some fantastic work implementing totalmix for linux, and so the only "hole" at the moment for these cards appears to involve some issues with MIDI performance (and firmware lags) >--*-- Same question, smaller footprint: If you were going to buy a modern lap >top for use with ALSA, what would you buy? What has the best chipset, with t >he best ALSA driver support? having no real laptop experience, i'll leave this to someone else. but i would add that given your first question, i would forget about the onboard chipset and use a hammerfall pcmcia interface. Paul Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bala Cynwyd, PA, USA Linux Audio Systems 610-667-4807 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- hybrid rather than pure; compromising rather than clean; distorted rather than straightforward; ambiguous rather than articulated; both-and rather than either-or; the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. Robert Venturi ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-devel
