FreeBoB 1.0.0 review

FreeBoB project aims to provide a free driver implementation for the BeBoB platform

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Pieter Palmers and Daniel Wagner

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FreeBoB project aims to provide a free driver implementation for the BeBoB platform. The BeBoB is used in many available IEEE 1394 based break-out boxes.

BeBoB devices are audio breakout boxes. BeBoB devices are attached with IEEE1394, a.k.a FireWire or i.Link, a high performance serial bus. FreeBoB is a generic Linux driver for BeBoB devices and supports JACK.

Requirements:
To build libfreebob you need several libraries. For all libraries a version is provided which is a 'known good' version. The first few libraries it seems it is not necessary that the version must
match. The chances that it works also with an older versions are good:

alsa (>= 1.0.0)
libxml2 (>= 2.6.0)
libpthread (>= 2.3.5)

These libraries here should be at least the version listed:

libraw1394 (>= 1.2.1), http://www.linux1394.org
libiec61883 (>= 1.1.0), http://www.linux1394.org
libavc1394 (>= 0.5.3), http://sourceforge.net/projects/libavc1394

Currently only the jackd audio server is supported.

jackd (>= 0.102.20), http://jackaudio.org

Optionally, but recommended is that you install qjackctl:

qjackctl (>= 0.2.21), http://sourceforge.net/projects/qjackctl

Running:

The easiest way to run this is using qjackctl. There are only minor differences with the other backends, however you should change some of the default values:

- The 'interface' field should contain only a number. This number is the port number of the IEEE1394 host controller the audio device is connected to. For most people this will be '0', but if you have multiple controllers, you have to change this number.
- The 'Input channels' and 'Output channels' fields indicate if the backend should provide capture and/or playback channels. If you set these to 0, no channels are created. In order to enable capture and/or playback, you have to set them to a nonzero value.
- It is recommended to change the 'periods/buffer' field to 3, especially if you use low period sizes (=< 128)
- It is recommended to raise the RT priority to 70.

In order to get it running from the command line, you need to provide some arguments to jackd.

Run

$ jackd -d freebob --help

to see the backend options. You can easily figure out how to set them using the remarks given above (for qjackctl).