CW looking for experienced OSX and Linux hackers

Post by **hubird** » Mon Mar 22, 2004 4:44 am

great link, specially when it comes from you Kenf

Kenf · Post by **Kenf** » Mon Mar 22, 2004 6:02 am

Please don't start picking on me..... I'm not really as bad as you think.... If a fully working system was available on Linux I would be delighted.
I just want a system that works now!
I am dissapointed because just about everytime I use XTC mode there is a problem, normally it does not remember settings, all well documented on this forum. My latest problem is that my SPDIF on my PulsarII has continous very loud noise on it. All ADAT channels and analogue channels fine, all have been working fine for months. Could be nothing to do with CW??
I use XTC over SFP because I love using Reason rewired to SX2 and it's a pain trying to plug in devices in SFP mode as you cannot break into rewire channels between Reason and SX2. So if I want to put Transient Designer on the output of a Bass Drum in Reason I can't. I have a UAD-1 card and it integrates into my system beautifully, I want CW to as well. Now I tend not use any CW devices because of always having to work around problems. I find it frustrating because these 'bugs' are 'probably' quite easy to put straight, the codes there but things are not being saved in the right places.... I know I am speculating but part of my job is software testing/debugging and I often see this kind of error and it is often easy to correct... maybe a typo in the first place.
Please don't see me as a CW hater I do have a real softspot for it, but I am selfish, after spending £1000s on CW products I want it to work.... 'just as it said on the box'.

Regards
Kenf

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kenf on 2004-03-22 06:04 ]</font>

Post by **hubird** » Mon Mar 22, 2004 8:43 am

Hi Kenf, I'm sorry if I did upset you.
I really just wanted to be gentle, it surprised me in a positive way that specially you come up with that great link. I wasn't cynical at all.
Look at the smilies, I'm using them as words

Actually I immediately emaild Wsippel to point him to your post, after having read it.
He's out on a bussiness trip, and I was hoping to reach him this way as soon as possible

I'm sorry you have those problems.
I cannot judge about if it are bugs or not.
I use the TD very intensely, I can imagine your frustration.
There must be workarounds, like routing the track through SFP and bounce it to audio, like I do by myself.
No bugs or problems on my mac with SFP, so I cant help you.

About XTC: try to derive comfort from the fact that XTC on mac never was implemented.
Yet we payed exactly the same price as you did...
So, IF there is any reasonable priority list, XTC for mac (and thus support for OS-X/Linux) might be on top of that list, to come along with the pc line

Anyway, I hope, as Wsippel said, we all will greatly benefit from the Linux adventure, including bugfixes and new plugs.
cheerz

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Mon Mar 22, 2004 9:37 am

Hi wsippel

Sorry I can't personally be of a great deal of help (mostly WMD & sometimes Solaris driver work myself), BUT I'm good friends with a guy at work who actually develops for FreeBSD at home - he's a device driver nut for sure.

Don't know if this will be of any help to you, but if you have any nasty low-level driver questions, then please pass them my way, I'm pretty sure I could get you some answers.

Royston

Sorry...that should have been WDM, not WMD drivers!

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Mon Mar 22, 2004 10:25 am

I'm not much of a coder (but can cook up a quick Notes/Domino app) but if I could be of any use as a beta-tester, I'd be thrilled. I'm a big SuSE buff, myself. If I could just squeeze a linux driver out of Magma, then my world would be complete!

Sam

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Mon Mar 22, 2004 12:09 pm

dehuszar wrote:

If I could just squeeze a linux driver out of Magma, then my world would be complete!

Might be a bit more to it than that...

http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 5&forum=19

The friend I mention in my previous post is actually the guy who write most of the extended Magma bus driver stuff I refer to in the above link - damn clever stuff.

Royston

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Wed Mar 24, 2004 11:04 pm

I've been curious to just check it out with SuSE Live. The one thing about Linux is that it's pretty damn good about being able to deal with any piece of hardware (even if not well) so long as the kernel has some knowledge of the device type programmed in. Obviously more specific hardware like a Creamware card, it could never get working, but bus cards it might be able to at least see.

Having said that, I seriously doubt it will work, I just want to see what it does.

Always digging further down the rabbit hole and all.

Sam

wsippel · Post by **wsippel** » Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:04 am

@dehuszar
Well, Linux sees the cards, and knows what it is, see:
"01:09.0 Multimedia controller: Creamware GmBH DSP-Board (rev 02)"

But that's it, the card wont work without drivers, of
course - and that's exactly what we want to change...

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:45 pm

I've never written, or even made sense of a driver before, so I don't know that I'd be helpful. I know no C, nor do I have any line-level coding experience (I've been having fun with Domino Designer though).

Having said that, I'd be happy to make myself useful in whatever way fits what I've mentioned above. Perhaps this is worth discussing privately if I haven't already disqualified myself.

What I was referring to about the kernel seeing hardware was that I run my CW cards through a Magma chassis. I'd be interested in booting SuSE Live on my laptop to see if SuSE's 2.4.xx with 2.6 backported items (specifically useful items being PCMCIA and standardized bus objects) could see the Magma chassis as extra PCI ports, as that's what they are. And if SuSE can see the PCI ports, can it see the CW cards as it would plugged into a native PCI port?

If so, then I'd quite possibly be able to run SuSE Live as a test platform without comprimising my working WinXP setup until I have a workable Linux environment for audio.

Off the top of my head, I really can't think of too many apps beyond Nero and Lotus Notes that I'd really miss. But K3B is getting better by the day, and Lotus is supposed to release a Linux version of Notes in May, so I might have nothing keeping me on the Dark Side of the force.

Perhaps the automation abilities of these Linux sequencers are not very nice, if implemented at all, but as I rarely use VST anything, cept lounge lizard (and even then I'm waiting for CW's electric piano to rise like a phoenix from the rumors), I doubt I'd really miss a lot of the tools available in Cubase as I never really dug into all the features that Cubase SX had to offer. Some of them take as much time to learn and make use of then they are supposed to save.

I had been griping for a long time that there wasn't just a simple (beyond a 909 style on/off) midi sequencer for SFP, as Cubase can sometimes be an impedance when I just want to jam out an idea. Again, I'd have to evaluate how usable these Linux sequencers are, but I can't forsee them being THAT awful that I couldn't work about the same as I do now.

I really would like to have SX 2 in the meantime, but I can't afford the update (I had to get SpaceF's echo first). This sequencer update game can really kiss my ass though. ...SoundForge is no better either.

I can't really see any major difference between version 6 which I own and version 7 which Sony is now sending me a mailer to buy every frickin three days! As if I didn't know what was in their stupid catalogue!

Being free from this kind of BS would be so unbelievably nice... just updating when features I'd use are available... being able to contribute ideas and perhaps, someday add my own code... ahh, bliss indeed in comparison to this corporate nightmare. Then I could save my money for the things that really mattered... like uberPlastic, B2003, Solaris and some RD Modules. ...and of course hassle free recording (yeah right... not in this lifetime).

Anyway, it's hard to tell from this end whether or not Windows is just stupid and needs extra help to operate beyond it's normal hardware resources paradigm, or if Magma's drivers are the necessity of some custom hardware that *nixes cannot see, nor could any other OS.

However, I seem to recall that when I was testing powerbooks with my Magma rig, OS9 didn't really need any drivers for the Magma. It just needed the CW drivers (which again leads us back to your comment) and viewed the Magma PCI ports without so much as a stutter. But Apple may have been prescient enough to have included special Magma drivers as standard issue in OS9, hence my curiousity.

Sam

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 11:38 am

On 2004-03-25 23:45, dehuszar wrote:
...But Apple may have been prescient enough to have included special Magma drivers as standard issue in OS9, hence my curiousity.

definetely not - OS9 hardware integration is pretty straight forward for 3rd parties.
Afaik Apple NEVER included any custom stuff for non-Apple devices in the OS.
PCI ATA-cards (for example) simply link to the standard SCSI driver in Mac OS.
Plug them in, the system finds a SCSI device, bingo - THAT's plug and play

couldn't resist, Tom

Micha · Post by **Micha** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 11:53 am

Will there be a cvs repository? CWA? Sourceforge?

wsippel · Post by **wsippel** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 12:32 pm

@Counterparts
I think the Magma-problems are Windows-only, Linux accesses
those things in a completely different fashion.

@dehuszar
According to Magma tech support, Linux supports the bridges
out of the box, without the need to use a driver. Linux has real
I2O and transparent PCI-to-PCI support... But, AFAIK, it's
really a Linux 2.6.x feature.

@Micha
There will be a repository, maybe CVS, maybe ARCH or
Subversion. But it will be private, of course...

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 6:36 pm

One way to find out eh?

If it wasn't backported for SuSE 9 or otherwise doesn't work, it should be available in the upcoming 9.1 which is a full 2.6 based kernel.

I'll give it a whirl tonight and post my results.

Sam

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 8:34 pm

Well, I am typing this from Konqueror using SuSE Live 8.2 (so no 2.6 kernel backports) and I can see my Pulsar II and Scope/SP card shining bright via my Magma chassis. So bring it on!

Sam

p.s. damn, KDE looks good on my laptop's screen!

gustav · Post by **gustav** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 7:47 am

Hello wsippel

did you have any contacts ?

I'm not OSX hackers / Linux coders

but if there is anything other that I can do - I would be glad to help

is there any place where one can see progress on your work ?

Good Luck

wsippel · Post by **wsippel** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 7:45 pm

Hi gustav.

Well, we might need some beta-testers, but not right now...

And no, there?s currently no place to get infos about the
progress, but I intent to keep you all up-to-date on this
forum.

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 8:36 pm

Hi,

Are you guys working on OSX support as well, or just Linux at the moment?

wsippel · Post by **wsippel** » Thu Apr 08, 2004 9:08 pm

Hi Shayne.

Well, we hope to start sometime in the next week, and we?ll
start working on both versions. The OSX version is pretty
much done, except for the driver and some minor stuff.
Can?t say how long it will take to get that one out of the
door, we?ll see...

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Sat Apr 10, 2004 7:36 pm

Wsipple, will there be specifics for setting up linux (kernal settings/patches, libs required etc) on the website other than just a recommendation to install a distro like redhat, suse etc?

I really did not expect to see SFP on anything but windows so this makes me very happy. What's even better is this would allow the creation of a user configured linux distro specifically for the SFP environment making it lean, fast and stable. This is something windows does not allow you to do!

Now all I'd like to see is a "pulsar on Amiga OS 4 project" and I'll be *REALLY* happy. I guess linux will have to do for now.

(Amiga OS4 is a new version of amiga OS currently in pre-Alpha stage and will run on G4 PPC hardware. The hardware is actually already available.)

wsippel · Post by **wsippel** » Sat Apr 10, 2004 8:20 pm

No, we don't want to create SFP for a specific distro.

Since all developers involved use different distros (gentoo
for me, FC and SUSE for others), this wouldn't make sense.
I doubt that there will be an Amiga version (at least from our
team), 'cause the number of potential users is two small -
otherwise, we could try to port to MorphOS, Pegasos, QNX...
We plan to port to OSX, Linux/x86, Linux/AMD64 and
Linux/PPC, should be sufficient...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: wsippel on 2004-04-10 21:23 ]</font>