Hi, New to this mailing list so please go easy on me. I've been reading through the Alsa docs, wiki, and still not sure of the best approach, so looking for advice from the experts.

I'm looking to develop support for the Samson C01U USB studio microphone.

http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1810

This currently does work via the snd-usb-audio alsa driver, but not in a way that is particularly usable (to the extent that many users have been reporting it as "not working". I thought I might attempt to remedy this.

The problem is that, internally, the device contains two digitally controlled amplifiers. Both of these gain controls are exposed via the USB interface (and, hence, by snd-usb-audio) and you can even access the audio stream which is output from each amp. The problem is the raw gain controls are not meant to be accessed directly in this way.

The output of one of the amps is fed into the input of the other. With the Windows and Mac OSX drivers, only one gain control is presented. When this is is altered, the driver adjusts the gain of both amplifiers in order to get the correct output level but with minimum noise.

In effect, there is a "virtual gain control" which is used to adjust the real gain controls in a predefined way.

By careful "twiddling" of the controls it's possible to get the microphone working properly, but it is, quite frankly, a very poor way to handle the problem and is really beyond what should be expected of most users.

I would like to do something about this if I can.

My aim is to develop something which presents a single gain control to users which controls the internal amp gains in a sensible way.

The question is, what is the best way to approach this?

Looking at it, I believe there are three possible approaches. In order of my preference they are:

1) Develop at alsa driver level to get a driver which presents a single mixer control to users 2) Develop a new plugin for alsa which can be patched in via asoundrc to provide a generic "Virtual gain control" 3) Provide a user-space tool, a bit like envy24control, which provides this capability

My question to the alsa-devel community is which path should I take? As I said my preference is to do something at the driver level simply because it would be most transparent to users and applications: it would simply work. It may also require less code.

If this is the correct path to take, this then presents some sub-options (again in order of preference):

a) Patch the existing snd-usb-audio driver with some vendor-specific code for this devices (and others which will be similar, like the C03U) b) Fork the snd-usb-driver into a new vendor-specific version and modify as before

I prefer a) again because it is transparent to the users, whilst b) will require modprobe or udev configuration, but there may be reasons why it is undesirable to "bloat" the code of snd-usb-audio with vendor-specific tweaks.

Bear in mind at this stage I haven't even looked at any of the code yet. Once I do I'm sure to have more questions.

But at the moment my question is simply: which is the best way to approach this to be compatible with the aims and philosophy of Alsa?

Many thanks,