Paul, I'd be happy to try to involve RME if there's some real chance that a Linux developer will really work on the issues. I don't want to try to pump them up and then not have anyone here to really look at it. Are you the person that would do this work? You're so busy with Ardour that for the good of the community you wouldn't be my first choice as I think this is a smaller issue than Ardour. I know you have used RME for years although I wasn't aware that you used an HDSP series card, if you do. As for breaking compatibility, for a few years now I've had to keep my HDSP 9652 firmware downgraded to get hdspmixer and hdspconf to function in Linux. This has meant things like weird clipping light operation in windows and other junk like that but since I did maybe 65% of my work in Linux I could live with 35% problems in Windows. I haven't downloaded the RME firmware updater yet but it will tell me the current version of firmware if it is helpful. With older hardware going up in smoke I have new machines and unfortunately you cannot load Win XP on these new machines easily. The machines do not have floppy drives to load drivers during boot, don't understand USB well enough to use something else as far as I can tell, and the XP install disk cannot see the SATA hard drives via new chipsets so it's all sort of a mess trying to stick with XP. Anyway that led to Win 7 64-bit pretty quickly, which is working. However when I got around to trying to load audio drivers I went to the RME web site and they stated very clearly that the Win 7 drivers require the newest firmware. I don't blame them. It's probably good stuff, but it looks like it will finally break compatibility with the 'old firmware to make Alsa drivers work' construct. If I'm incorrect about that then I'd love to figure that out. I'm copying what I think is the relevant portion of the RME readme here. Thanks, Mark <SNIP> RME Intelligent Audio Solutions HDSP Series (AES-32, MADI, 9652, 9632, Multiface, Digiface, RPM) HDSPe Series (PCI, MADI, MADIface, ExpressCard, RayDAT, AES, AIO) Driver for Windows XP/Vista/7, 32 and 64 Bit Important information: Driver version 3.083 This is the new HDSP(e) series WDM streaming driver, offering additional features like WDM streaming, kernel streaming, 64 bit support and full Vista compatibility. It supports all HDSP and HDSPe series cards and systems simultaneously. The TCO can be operated with the HDSP AES-32, the HDSPe PCI/MADI/AES/RayDAT/AIO, but not with the HDSP 9632. Notes on the driver ----------------- The driver requires a new flash/firmware in case driver 2.94 had been used before. The new firmware and new driver routines offer these advantages: - Lower system load on start of data transmission (start of record/playback) - Better performance on playback. We added a small safety buffer of 32 samples on the playback side. To give some numbers from a typical test machine, crackling starts at: Old driver 64 samples 60% 128 samples 70% CPU load New driver 64 samples 85% 128 samples 90% CPU load So even if you add the 32 samples to the 64 samples, the new driver still does a better job than the old one at 128! And the 32 samples are on the playback side only, so throughput monitoring is even more attractive. Because of this tremendous improvement we removed the highest buffer size and replaced it with a 32 sample setting as lowest setting. - Secure Record Technique. This driver includes a new scheme for handling record data. It guarantees all record data to reach the application even when the computer is blocked with 100% CPU load for a short time. We think this is a real killer feature, as there is nothing more important than reliability when doing recordings. - The driver does not support MME, and will never do. If you need low latency MME for whatever reason, stay with the old driver. Note that all older MME software will work with the new driver, but will show more than 30 ms latency. - This driver requires a newer version of DIGICheck, version 4.53. Please download it from the RME website, section Downloads/Add-Ons. <SNIP> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > How about forwarding to RME support as well? Nothing can be done to > deal with the firmware upgrade unless RME supplies information about > what they are changing. I'm also interested in how you came to the > knowledge that the firmware upgrade will break ALSA support ... > > On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hi all, >> Please excuse the cross-post to LAU and Alsa-User. > _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
