Project update

Thanks to TC Applied Technologies, I have the opportunity again this year to go to the Musikmesse in Frankfurt later this week. This gives me the opportunity to meet vendors face-to-face, which might help getting some extra support. Many thanks to TCAT (especially Steven) for this.

The main goal of this trip is to meet with the people behind the TC Konnekt interfaces to discuss support for their devices. I’m very interested in this meeting, and will definitely keep you posted on how things evolve. On the ‘convince-a-sceptic’ quest my first priorities will be Presonus and Alesis, but the more the merrier I’d say.

Being at the Musikmesse anyway, I will also try and meet up with the other vendors of FireWire devices. I will definitely drop by the Focusrite stand to thank them for the support, and show off our support for their devices. The same scenario will bring me to the Musonic stand (former Terratec Producer), ESI (if present) and Mackie (if I can find a FireWire rep). The ECHO people have already informed me that they won’t be there. Before people start suggesting it, I’ll even drop by at the RME stand, although I’m not going to be too persistent. They know the deal. Hey, I might even drop by the MotU stand and give them an opportunity to do what they like… laugh at open source. In any case, it is important not to forget who pays my visit, which means that vendors using DICE have priority.

It has been almost one year since the FFADO project was launched, and people increasingly wonder when we are going to release. A very valid question indeed, but let me first make some remarks on this. First of all, consider the fact that we are a very small group of developers (about 3 core developers) that all have a daytime job and some sort of ‘other’ life. That certainly doesn’t speed up the development process. A second issue is that we feel that for this type of project one should be very careful about the quality of the released code. There are a lot of variables that are out of our control (distribution configuration, interrupt sharing, firewire controller, cables, …), meaning that we’d better make sure that our code works. The FreeBoB project learned us that releasing quality code will give you less support work afterwards, and that’s what we’d like to achieve with FFADO too.

That’s for the disclaimer, now let’s get to the point: the code currently in the development repository is functional for all supported devices, except for the reverse engineered MOTU code. The latter should be working, but hasn’t been verified thoroughly yet. The performance of the current codebase is comparable to the FreeBoB code, both in CPU usage, reliability as latency. The main issues that still have to be resolved are mainly related to aesthetics, distribution and installation. What this means is that you can expect a beta version pretty soon. Maybe even before FFADO’s first anniversary?

Greets,

Pieter Palmers (on behalf of the FFADO team)