From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Tue Feb 23 12:50:46 1999
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Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 12:49:32 +0100 (CET)
From: Winfried Ritsch <ritsch@iem.mhsg.ac.at>
To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
Subject: RME DIGI 32, DIGI32/8, DIGI 96, DIGI 96/8 Hardwareinfo denied.
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Reply-To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
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I want to inform ALSA Developer about my survey to get RME DIGI 32,
DIGI32/8, DIGI 96, DIGI 96/8 Hardwareinfo.

(DIGI 32/8 is the older, DIGI 96/8 is the newer Produkt:
PCI 1 SPDIF - AES/EBU or 1 ADAT I/O about U$ 500, http://www.rme-audio.com/)

After my question for Hardwareinfo for programming ALSA low level
driver, they denied:

- they do only NDAs, and they did with 4Front

(the OSS driver was announced 1 year ago, but do not work in 8 channel
mode even it was announced for sept.98 and now 4front told me they
would not make a 8 channel driver for DIGI32/8, but there will be one
likely for DIGI 96/8 in summer, and the main reason
for me, the DEC-Alpha Linux driver did not work even it cost
US$20.-+US$80.-) and I dont think the 8.-channel driver for DEC Alpha
will work if the 2-channel did not work.

(What excatly is a NDA ?)

- so because ALSA distribute the source code, they do not want this
kind of thing, afraid someone can rebuild their Hardware because of
info in the source code, since they mentioned with the source you can
the special concepts for rthe hardware. 

- they see a conflict potential between ALSA and OSS

so no chance to get this.

Good news:

For their new card coming in Frankfurter Musikermesse called "Hammerfall"
with 3xADAT, 1xAES-EBU/ADAT 24bit/96kHz will cost about DM 1000.-
(ca. US$500) they offered me a talk about a new possibility to get
info about hardware, writing driver, because the card is full
PCI-Master capable, so only less info is needed to write the driver.

mfg winfired







