The FFADO team is happy to announce the release of the second release candidate for FFADO 2.0.
It has been 6 months since we released FFADO 2.0 Release Candidate 1, and we have to admit that this is quite long. The usage statistics show that about 300 people have been using RC1 in this period, and the good news is that we did not get a lot of bug reports. Most of the reports filed were related to crappy host controller hardware (most notably the Ricoh controllers), which is something we unfortunately cannot fix. In the mean time the remaining bug reports have been fixed, so here we are again.
This release candidate contains a few reliability improvements and bugfixes that should get some field testing before we can release the official 2.0. I would therefore like to ask all users and packagers to upgrade as soon as possible such that we can release sooner rather than later. If we get to about 100 registered users without significant significant bug reports I feel confident that we're good to go. So happy testing!
The first device to take full advantage of our DICE platform support will be the Focusrite Saffire PRO40. The platform based audio and MIDI streaming is fully functional. The custom mixer functionality is currently being alpha-tested.
The DICE platform support also enables the basic use of the TC Electronic Konnekt 8, 24D and Live. Support for these devices is limited to streaming (no DSP effects). Currently it doesn't look like the DSP is going to be supported any time soon.
Support for the Behringer FCA-202 has been added.
Support for the Stanton SCS.1 series is added. Support for both the audio I/O as the HSS1394 control surface protocol has been implemented, meaning that these devices are fully functional.
We keep on talking to several device vendors to increase our device support, and we will most likely be announcing some new devices in the near future.
The second major development is the move of the streaming infrastructure to kernel space. Thanks to the Google Summer of Code and the Linux Foundation, we have somebody working on this during the summer. A kernel-space implementation will bring significant improvements with respect to reliability and efficiency. Furthermore it will expose an ALSA interface, meaning that the scope of FireWire audio is extended significantly.
As Ubuntu has picked up FFADO in its latest release, we no longer provide our own APT repository.
Reediting my comment.. Just realized konnekt support is only for 2.1... I'll try to get the development tree and see what's happening with my konnekt. Thanks a lot for your hard work!
I am using konnekt 24D and i would love to switch totally to linux , i just cannot manage my konnekt card to work.
Can i ask You for some help please ?
I have an Edirol FA-101, and have been a regular user of freebob/ffado since mid-2007, and reliability has always been an issue. Previous to this, I used an M-Audio Delta 44, which was utterly flawless (hooked into jackd, ardour etc).
Granted, I think some of these issues are related to whats going on elsewhere in both user and kernel space, and Linus himself mentions performance regressions in the kernel (as a side note, Gtk of late runs like molasses, and my overall experience is slower and less reliable than the alternative - Windows XP, which is sad, and didn't always use to be the case).
Anyway, I am hopefully optimistic that improvements in both the code base and refactoring into the kernel will improve the state of firewire audio on linux immensly, and I would love to test bugs and give feedback, but there doesn't seem to be much information on this. Are you able shed some light??
First of all: Biiig thank you for all your efforts!
I'd like to upgrade to RC2 in my studio, but I'm only using LTS versions of Ubuntu on production systems (and I guess I'm not alone with that).
From Canonical, Hardy is still supported until April 2011 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases), so are there any plans to still package for Hardy?
If not, I could offer to build a proper .deb package for RC2 to safe others some work.
Hi, I know Linux and most of its programs/applications are meant to be used by individuals savvy enough to build from code. But is there a possibility that this can be developed past the half-baked point....so that us knuckle draggers can enjoy it too?
A sudo apt-get install ..... and it builds, downloads and configures itself would be nice. Does it really take that much more to have everything in a package like that?
Lets count the ubuntu-version in usage nowadays: 8.04, maybe 8.10, definitely 9.04 and 9.10. Add to that the different versions of Suse, Redhat/Fedora, Mandriva, Gentoo, Arch and all the other debian-based distros. Lets not forget about debian itself.
Times two for x86 and x86_64 to have the most important architectures.
Now take a look at the time we had in the past year to work on ffado. And then substract the time needed to build and support packages into the various distributions.
Packaging software into the distributions system is a job far better done by the distributors themselves. And they do a terrific job at that!
Please ask your distribution vendor to include the packages you want. Normally they are quite fast at picking ffado into their systems.
It might not be the most user-friendly way, but we prefer to spend our time bug-hunting and coding and sometimes even helping users. I am very thankful that there are others enjoying packaging our software into the distributions.
Speaking for myself, if I start packaging too, my wife will probably throw all he computers out of the window.
How is the progress going with the TC Konnekt???
I see there are some pics of TC that seems to be working in Linux...I take it you are at the bug killing phase.
Regarding 1) that is not a fix! Moving the library after installation is asking for troubles because the install-path is also coded into the library to fetch additional text-files and dependencies. Better use "scons PREFIX=/usr" from the start.