[alsa-devel] GR-55 Driver
I need a Driver for the Roland GR-55 Guitar Synthesizer, not sure how to get started, so I thought this would be a good place to ask.
The GR-55 has MIDI and AUDIO
KSNAME_Wo11="WaveOut1-1" WDM.Wo11.szPname="OUT (GR-55)"
KSNAME_Wi11="WaveIn1-1" WDM.Wi11.szPname="IN (GR-55)"
KSNAME_Md11="Midi1-1" WDM.Md11.szPname="GR-55"
My thinking is that there may be a driver that is similar, or someone could already be working on a driver, if so, I would like to find out if I could work on that project or if I could start a new project here.
I did contact Roland about getting help in the way of Documentation; but was told not to count on it since most of this documentation is proprietary; so I might end up having to snoop the information to reverse engineer it.
I have been a programmer for over 30 years, and have written Unix drivers and interfaces back in the 80's; things have changed since then and Linux is Unix like, but ALSA seems a lot easier than what we did back in those days. I can get up to speed with just a point in the right direction. Things like do I do this as a driver or a module? Are just a few questions that I need answers to, just to get started.
Can you recommend a driver that is close enough to use as a template to start a new driver from?
Thanks.
Jeff Flesher
Hi Jeff,
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Jeffrey Scott Flesher Gmail jeffrey.scott.flesher@gmail.com wrote:
I need a Driver for the Roland GR-55 Guitar Synthesizer, not sure how to get started, so I thought this would be a good place to ask.
First of all, thanks for considering contribution to the ALSA project.
The GR-55 has MIDI and AUDIO
KSNAME_Wo11="WaveOut1-1" WDM.Wo11.szPname="OUT (GR-55)"
KSNAME_Wi11="WaveIn1-1" WDM.Wi11.szPname="IN (GR-55)"
KSNAME_Md11="Midi1-1" WDM.Md11.szPname="GR-55"
My thinking is that there may be a driver that is similar, or someone could already be working on a driver, if so, I would like to find out if I could work on that project or if I could start a new project here.
Given that this device is connected via USB, the first thing to find out is whether the device is implemented in any class-compliant way. "lsusb -v" will provide a lot of information that is needed to know where to start.
Basically, there are two options. Either the device just needs some entries in the quirks tables of the generic ALSA USB audio driver, which is very likely. Or the device uses an entirely proprietary protocol on the bus (like the usx2y, ua101, Terratec 6fire or the older Native Instruments cards do) which means that there is need to write a specific driver from scratch. The drivers I mentioned are all in the mainline kernel git repository and serve well as examples for new implementations.
So in short: the first thing to do is to share the output of "lsusb -v" on this list.
HTH, Daniel
participants (2)
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Daniel Mack
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Jeffrey Scott Flesher Gmail