Re: [FFADO-user] support of soundcraft firewire card

[Jonathan W. <jw...@ju...>]

Hi Timothé

> Soundcraft released this year a "multi digital" card for its digital
> console:
> http://www.soundcraft.com/news/news_story.aspx?nid=693&s=1

Nice.

> As I guess this is one of the first time they do some firewire nothing is
> referenced in the ffado device compatibility.

That is entirely possible.  They *might* have had firewire on a few of their
higher-end boards before this - I can't recall off-hand.  What I can say is
that up to now no one has contacted the FFADO project in connection with
Soundcraft hardware. :-)

> However it states that it does not need drivers on Mac computers, which let
> me think they have a pretty standard "communication", which then I guess
> ffado would already support for other devices.

It's hard to know what this means in practice.  It may mean that they
utilise a common chipset like the DM1500 or DICE in a generic way for which
there is a generic driver in OSX.  Then again, they may also be doing
something proprietary, having managed to get a suitable driver inserted into
OSX.

If this card does utilise a generic chipset such as those mentioned above
then it's possible that at least some of the functionality will be available
using FFADO.  It won't be possible to know the extent of this support until
we know more about the implementation of this interface.

> Any thought if this reasonning is valid ?

Even the generic solutions permit "vendor-specific extensions".  If any of
these have been employed we would need to do some work to make FFADO support
these.  Having said that, most of the time an interface's core functionality
does not use these extensions.

> Are they some relevant question to ask to soundcraft to help on finding out
> if it would work or not ?

Usually the proof is in the testing: someone tries to use the device with
FFADO and reports what they find. :-)

In the first instance we need to know what firewire audio solution they have
adopted: DICE, BeBoB, something else.  This will give us some idea as to
whether the existing FFADO code is likely to do something useful with the
interface.

To have FFADO interact with the interface we need to know the vendor and
model ID numbers from the so-called ConfigROM so FFADO knows to try to use
it.  This can be obtained in various ways under Linx: using gscanbus,
capturing /sys/bus/firewire/devices/fw1/config_rom and decoding with
crpp[1].

Regards
  jonathan

[1] From http://user.in-berlin.de/~s5r6/linux1394/utils/crpp_v20120612