On 11/20/2001 Paul Winkler wrote: > On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 02:50:32PM +0100, Jaroslav Kysela wrote: > > > USB Audio is supported only with the OSS drivers. We have no > > driver for the USB Audio devices. > > :( This is very sad - I want to run Ardour which *needs* ALSA, and > my laptop soundcard's input sounds terrible even if I get it to load > without freezing the system. How feasible would it be to port the > kernel usb/audio.c driver to ALSA? > > How much work for a good C programmer? > Or for a bad C programmer like myself?
I have been thinking about writing a ALSA-USB driver, however I have a large task ahead of me. I've been writing C for about 8 years 3 of which is professional. The biggest part of such a project is learning to write drivers. The O'reilly book "Linux Device Drivers" is good, but like any programming task you learn allot more by doing than just reading. The other challenge for me is, I haven't had any recent experience dealing with hardware level stuff. Back in the 80's, (boy this makes me feel old) I programmed on the C= 64. On that computer the OS did not insulate the programmer from the hardware. Back then I often programmed on the hardware level. Something which is a potential problem to all Linux Driver writers is the hardware companies attitude toward releasing information. In the olden days of home computers, hardware companies where only to happy to release technical specs for it's products. Now, however many companies are reluctant to release the kind of information driver writers need. I've looked into the Roland UA-30 and from what I've read it seams to be a high quality product. My main concern is that I can't find any technical information on it, this is true for other USB audio devices I've looked into. I was able to find quite a lot of information about the integrated USB/CODEC chip manufactured by Philips. A copy of those docs are mirrored on the ALSA sight under the Philips directory located at "ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/manuals/";. If I do write a driver I am thinking about starting with that chip since I can find information on it. PS. This is just something I have been thinking about, not a commitment or announcement that I will work on it. ======================================================================= Steven Feil | Gram-pa, back at the turn of the .~. Programmer/Developer | century, why did people use an /V\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] | operating system, when they were not // \\ | allowed to see the source code? (X_X) ======================================================================= _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
