Re: [linux-audio-user] Re: [linux-audio-dev] RME is no more
Hi all, I will also make my official statement to all sound card manufacturers. I will only buy sound cards that are fully operational with my operating system of choice - Linux. Around 6 months ago I did just this, I was in the market for a professional multichannel sound card interface for my laptop and even though the unit is much more expensive than the competition (like double the price for less features, although probably slightly better quality), I purchased an RME Hammerfall Cardbus and Multiface. I hope you are all listening to this and what this means, I am willing to pay double the price (in this case $1400 AUD more!) for a sound interface that supports Linux. If RME doesn't wish to support the development of open source drivers for their hardware, I will have to go elsewhere. Regards, Dan On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 17:57 -0600, Jan Depner wrote: Hi all, The official statement is that there will be no support for RME from me. In other words I will buy no hardware or software from RME because it is impossible for me to share my hard earned money with a company that is unwilling to support my operating system of choice. But I'll certainly share my money with other companies. Any companies listening out there? Regards Jan Depner On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 19:14, Marek Peteraj wrote: Hi all, sorry for crossposting, just wanted to let everybody know: The official statement is that there will be no support for ALSA (Linux) FireWire drivers from RME. In other words there will be no such drivers, as it is impossible to write them without tons of hardware and software documentation from RME. And we won't share these information with anyone. Regards Matthias Carstens RME No further explanations. The moral of this story is: Never buy a product that isn't already supported in ALSA, such as i did. :( There's no guarantee even if pretty much every other card from the same manufacturer *is* already supported. Me and Benno talked to Matthias personally during Musikmesse, he was friendly and seemed to be open with regards to future cooperation with oss developers. Seems like things have changed dramatically since then. Marek -- Dan Harper http://danharper.org --- Enhancing the Linux desktop for desktop users --- --- http://danharper.org/linuxdesktopblog/ ---
Re: [linux-audio-dev] RME is no more
Maybe we should start a sooper dooper fundraising scheme like what the firefox crew did ;) On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 01:42 +0100, Jens M Andreasen wrote: On tor, 2004-11-25 at 02:49 +0300, Dmitry Baikov wrote: Time to develop really open (FireWire?) audio interface, free as in speech. As you might have already noticed, free (as in freedom) designs for hardware have been discussed here lately. There is a fee for prototyping though! I believe that the consensus was that one should not use the nearmost supplier (close to Arctic Circle?) but rather the least expensive supplier (which may be in Melbourne) We are still talking a ton of dough, and an individual fronting the consequences of everybody else banging out, is risking a substantial sum of money. /j BTW: MIDI Firewire is a standard freely for sale ;- -- Dan Harper http://danharper.org --- Enhancing the Linux desktop for desktop users --- --- http://danharper.org/linuxdesktopblog/ ---
Re: [linux-audio-dev] RME is no more
The Firefox Crew is referring to the team that have recently released version 1.0 of Firefox [http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/], an Internet browser based on Mozilla [http://www.mozilla.org]. They recently rallied to fundraise money to fund a full page advertisement in the New York Times. Apparently they received around $200,000 USD in total, the left over goes to future software development efforts. [http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/4891%E2%80%9D] Now, our Linux Audio audience is a lot narrower than what a web browser would appeal to, but maybe it's a start, and with some smarts, we may surprise ourselves. Dan On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 02:23 +0100, Jens M Andreasen wrote: On tor, 2004-11-25 at 11:53 +1100, Dan Harper wrote: Maybe we should start a sooper dooper fundraising scheme like what the firefox crew did ;) Well, my 20ยค is here, but who would you like me to send them to?. Preferrably to someone not going to Goa next week. On the other hand, I am not at all familiar with The Firefox Crew nor what they have done. Can you elaborate on that? We are still talking a ton of dough, and an individual fronting the consequences of everybody else banging out, is risking a substantial sum of money. /j -- Dan Harper http://danharper.org --- Enhancing the Linux desktop for desktop users --- --- http://danharper.org/linuxdesktopblog/ ---
Re: [linux-audio-dev] Knobs / widget design
I for one dislike the knob design, you just cannot make fine adjustments easily. Someone said that you can take the mouse out to a greater radius from the knob, but that is just plain silly. While you move the mouse out from the knob, you're bound to make small adjustments to the value of the knob, unless you're a super-human, ultra-precision mouser! This means that you're original value of the knob has been lost, and you'd have to live with that, or move it to it's original position first, and then make your slight adjustment. Also, it's just not natural for me to move my mouse in a circle, the natural movement of my hand is not a circle, try to draw a perfect circle in the Gimp sometime by mouse! This means, that at different parts of the knob tweaking, you'd be changing value by an unpredictable amount depending on how good your circle is. This means also that left-handed mousers are going to change values at the opposite sensitivity level at different parts of the motion. There is no easy solution as far as I can see, but what about a few physical knobs, cheaply built, that send some kind of data via USB or something that can change values. That's the best way I reckon, except for the cost factor. I'll keep thinking about a purely software solution though. Dan -- Dan Harper http://danharper.org
[linux-audio-dev] Linux Audio Experiences
Hi all (sorry for the cross-post, but this may not be just a problem with Ardour), Over the last week and the weekend, I took to recording a song in full using Jack, Hydrogen, Ardour and Jamin. I'm not sure if Ardour/LAD is the best place to send this, but some things that I noticed may be across different software, but I thought I'd list a few issues that came up, as well as some delights. I'm not on the Jack or Hydrogen lists, but if this is a Jack or Hydrogen problem, please let me know and I'll post it there. The main problem I had was the sync between Hydrogen and Arodur. I had Hydrogen set as Jack transport slave, and Ardour as master. Both programs were set at 130 bpm, but if I recorded something to a track in Ardour, and then played it back, it sounded fine (in time), but on the screen, the recorded material does not line up with the bar lines in Ardour. The recorded stuff appears a few millimetres before the bar line. Another interesting thing was if I changed the (period?) in Jack from 512 to 1024, the Hydrogen playback was out of time to the Ardour playback, if I switched it back to the original setting it was recorded in, it was fine. I had a few stability problems, but I didn't test them very much, it seemed to be realted to having certain plugins enabled in Ardour. Jack was kicking Ardour out when a particular plugin was being used. I'll have to test that another time to get more detail. Overall though, things went fairly smoothly. The result of the weekend is available at http://danharper.org/songs.php if anyone is interested. It was all done in Linux: HYDROGEN - ARDOUR JAMIN - QARECORD Electric Guitar (3 tracks) Vocals (3 tracks) Bass Guitar Vocals Bus Hydrogen Out to an Ardour Bus Master Bus Feel free to give feedback on the song, mix, and mastering. One thing that I loved was Jack. Getting a nice sounding mix and master was so easy because I could change a track level in Hydrogen, and immediately hear the results through Jamin. Same also if I needed to change a plugin parameter or track level in Ardour, the results were immediate. There is no other set of audio tools around that I know of that can do this. A very powerful and useful feature of the design of Jack and its clients. Overall, I should mention that the majority of my time was spent wrestling with LADSPA plugins. Some cased reliability issues in Ardour (see above, more info to come). Some gave me some OK sounds, but I have noticed in the mixdown that the guitar orverdrive doesn't have a nice warm sound. I can't recall the exact plugins I used from memory, but I did find it hard to find plugins that would give me a nice warm sound on guitar tracks. Maybe that is something to improve upon. Dan
