Re: [FFADO-user] M-AUDIO Firewire 410 support

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

Hi Michele, David

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 08:43:50PM +0000, Michele Perrone wrote:
> I've just tested my M-Audio firewire 410 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Ardour 4
> and everything seems to work well.
> 
> Also ffado-mixer recognizes every input/output of the soundcard and the sampling rate.
> 
> Why is then the FW410 marked as "unsupported"?

On the device support page at

  http://ffado.org/?q=devicesupport/list

there's a link to the FAQ question "What do the support levels mean?".  On
this page, under "Unsupported" it says:

  If a device is listed as 'unsupported' or 'unknown' this doesn't mean that
  we can't or won't support it.  It simply means that we don't have the
  things we need to support it.

Historically this usually meant that none of the FFADO developers had access
to the device, and therefore it was not possible to provide first-hand
support for the device.  Such devices could move to the "Reported to work"
category if others had tested it, found it to be working, and told the FFADO
project about it.

Maintenence of the device support database has probably not kept up with
code changes in recent years, so it's possible that a previous success
report with the FW410 might not have been transferred to the device's
status.  FFADO does include some code to support the FW410, so it's entirely
possible that a status update was due at some point but never happened.

On Tue, 26 Jun 2018 at 16:45:45 -0400, David Kastrup wrote:
> Are you sure it is supported by Ffado?  Or is it rather supported by
> ALSA?

The specific mention of ffado-mixer indicates that the device's mixer
interface is being correctly accessed and controlled by FFADO.

As to the audio side, there's insufficient information in the original post
to tell whether FFADO or the ALSA kernel streaming driver (snd-bebob) was
used.  Given the distribution version, either is possible.  Thus at this
point, on the basis of this one post, we can't say for sure that FFADO's
streaming system was the one working during the reported tests.  Evidence
within FFADO's source code suggests that the FW410 could work when using
FFADO (that is, through the "firewire" JACK backend), but unless we know how
JACK was configured for Michele's test we're just guessing.

Michele: if you can confirm that audio streaming was via FFADO for your
tests I'd be happy to adjust the FW410's status accordingly.

Regards
  jonathan