Documentation for Pro Audio Spectrum?
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Quoted 16 lines · Dave Jones
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Are there any OSS drivers for any particular cards for which we don't have an equivalent ALSA driver ?
At least the Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 (PAS). An old and rather quirky ISA card, but one that does have particularly decent audio quality; much better then the usual ISA soundblaster[-clones] anyways. As such, some people might grumble a bit if Linux support for it was completely dropped.
The ALSA project seems rather set on "no documentation == no driver" and seeing as how Media Vision (and its successor company, the name of which I have now forgotten; it was bought out by creative labs) is out of business and how I've never seen a PAS datasheet "out in the wild" getting ALSA support for this and perhaps other such older hardware could prove troublesome still ...
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Bring this up on the kernel list.
*someone* must still have documentation for this beast.
My own PAS16 sports the following chips (may have misidentified their function):
MV Spectrum MVD101D - Multimedia controller (native interface) MV Spectrum MVA416 - PCM
MV Spectrum MVA508 - Mixer
MV Thunder MVD201A - SB Pro compatible part
and a 28MHz oscilator (which is I believe relevant since not all PASs use the same clock or something)
Note: the PAS16 is not SB Pro compatible, it just /has/ an SB Pro compatible part; with the current OSS drivers you get /dev/{audio,dsp,mixer}{0,1} with 0 being the native PAS16 stuff and, unless you disable it, 1 the SBP stuff
The card's quirky in that it doesn't seem to (directly, natively) support a 44100 sampling rate; I had to resample to a supported rate to get it to produce something audible under Linux. The Windows driver seems to compensate for that automagically (and has that "28MHz clock source" as a driver option). Simply catting an .au to /dev/audio0 does let Linus pronounce Linux (in both Swedish and English) though.
Rene.