On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 08:48:54PM -0400, Nick Guenther wrote: > I was very excited to open up my new Native Instruments Audio4DJ > soundcard today, but when I plugged it in I found out the wool they're > pulling over their customers eyes. With 4.5 it shows up as > ugen0 at uhub0 port 1 "Native Instruments Audio 4 DJ" rev 2.00/0.92 addr 3 > which, you'll note, is NOT a uaudio(4). > > The latest ALSA appearently supports it with sound/usb/caiaq (e.g. > http://tomoyo.sourceforge.jp/cgi-bin/lxr/source/sound/usb/caiaq/), so > that means that it won't Just Work on Windows, Mac, or Linux without > installing drivers. I'm writing though because I don't know enough > about the various USB standards at play here; I'm writing to ask if I > should return it or not.
definitely, unless you plan do add the support yourself. Is there a chance in hell that BSD (or even > *BSD) would grow support for this card? Is the linux driver a hack or > does "caiaq" mean some new standard that may some day be supported? > (googling turned up only references to the driver itself). there is only one usb audio standard. > Proprietary devices are so frustrating, so paying-to-be-a-slave. I > don't want to do that unless there's a good reason for it. A friend > suggests that USB soundcards by default are "cpu driven" so there's a > lower bound on the latency that can be achieved, uaudio(4) currently uses 10ms buffers. pretty much all PCI devices can do better. but, that's mostly a driver issue. usb1 should be able to operate at 1 or 2 ms latency. usb2 could possibly be lower. but again I don't > know enough about this area to judge that for myself, and I don't know > where I'd start researching it. well, I'm looking at adding basic usb2 support in uaudio now, and I've not been having much luck. I've not done much with usb before, and there's plenty to learn just in that area, nevermind audio. > Thanks for any insight at all. > -Nick -- jake...@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
