Re: [Alsa-user] USB1.1 compliant

[<li...@la...>]

I see a similar problem cropping up in fanless PCs for video streaming. Well, worse since the fanless PC costs more than the USB soundcard. Now for the fanless PC, the issue should be the mobo's chipset and not something added by the manufacturer. 

In my USB situation, I got one of the USB soundcards working, though there were other issues. The software I was running needed to work in 8 bit mode, which I guess isn't part of the USB standard. I needed to run 4 cards and ended up just buying a used Magma PCI expander and Diamond cards that I knew worked with the program. (I couldn't find a modern mobo with 4 PCI slots.)

------Original Message------
From: Bill Unruh
To: li...@la...
Cc: als...@li...
Subject: Re: [Alsa-user] USB1.1 compliant
Sent: Jan 24, 2010 8:14 AM

On Sun, 24 Jan 2010, li...@la... wrote:

> Somewhat relevant to the other thread regarding USB1.1 devices working under linux,  does the ALSA community have a way of relaying to the manufacturer what element of their product prevents it from working under Linux? At the moment, all that is produced is a list of approved (known to work) products. Would a more proactive approach be useful, or so most manufacturers just don't care?
>
> I just don't see how a product that truly complies with a specification doesn't work universally.

The usual answer is that the manufacturer refuses to give out any information
as to how one can interface to the card-- what commands one can send it to do
various things. Then there are manufacturers of usb sound cards that refuse to
comply with the standards for usb sound cards. In all cases the manufacturers
know what they are doing. (I have no idea why most (all) sound cards still use
usb 1.1 that gets pretty marginal at the data rates one can get from sound
cards.

>
> My last comment is do we fault the chipset manufacturer, or does the product vendor add some hardware breaking the compliance?

Both. The chipset manufacturers ( who are often the same as the product
vendors) are proprietary and the sound card manufacturers are. 
I ran into this with MAudio. I asked them which of the files on their disk
were the firmware which they require uploading to their cards under Windows.
They told me that this was proprietary infomation, and they would not tell me. 
It is a piece of information which a perusal of the .inf files gave you, but
they refused to tell me.