[PlanetCCRMA] firewire support thru freebob?

[Mark Knecht]

On 10/31/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/31/05, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have not tried Freebob yet. I'm still studying it and looking around
> > for a 1394 box to buy. However I think it might be a bit harder to use
> > on a Planet box than some other distros right now. Freebob is
> > currently delivering it's own customized version of Jack which you are
> > required to use. I suspect that it's no big deal, but you'd have a
> > harder time keeping an RPM distro happy when you try to remove your
> > existing version of Jack to replace it with this one.
> >
> > I believe the Jack developers are talking about getting it into the
> > main Jack distribution so that the Freebob guys don't have to do that,
> > but it's not apparently there yet.
>
> I went through their wiki and couldn't find an explination of why they
> are building their driver into Jack. Whats the point?
>

They not really building it into Jack, or not exactly.

Up front - forgive me. I am not a programmer and nothing here
represents the truth. It's just my lay understanding.

If you download Jack as source and just untar it you will find that
there is a directory called drivers that has things like alsa, oss,
coreaudio, solaris,etc. in it. When you call jack with

jackd -R -d alsa -d hw

you are calling this internal alsa driver which then passes audio
along to your sound card's alsa driver. If you call coreaudio, as you
would on a Mac, then Jack passes the audio onto the Mac's coreaudio
sound system. I think that since the Freebob stuff is going through
the 1394 subsystem, and not really through Alsa, it's more like they
are parallel to Alsa, not really part of it so they have to put their
own stuff in that directory.

It is, again, my lay understanding, that you could move a copy of that
to the current Jack/drivers directory, rebuild the current Jack and
get it to work, albeit, it's untested by the Freebob folks.

The right answer is to have their freebob driver included in the main
Jack release. Then it will be tested by them and the Jack developers,
released normally, and included in what you get from Fernando. Until
then it's a bit of a kludge for some of us on Planet boxes.

Fortunately on Gentoo it's far easier for me to use an external Jack
release so I can play around a bit more. On my Planet box I don't
think I'd try it.

Thanks,
Mark