Hi Per

I'd like to know more about the health on the connections to MOTU, if they give any information about their products and how the development has proceeded over the years.

It kind of depends which MOTU devices you're asking about. There is, for example, an alsa driver for the MOTU Midi Timepiece AV (MTPAV) which presumedly makes the midi side of this available via the ALSA sequencer system.

I can't speak for any of MOTU's PCI/PCIe cards. However, in connection with their more recent outboard interfaces MOTU have been, to put it mildly, extremely unhelpful. Some on the net go so far as to say they are hostile to Linux. The facts are that despite multiple people requesting information from MOTU on how to drive their firewire interfaces MOTU have responded every time with a very terse non-negotiable "no, never". I don't know if anyone's ever asked about their USB-equipped devices but I can't imagine the answer would be any different.

Despite this, some progress is being made in supporting MOTU firewire devices under linux. For various reasons this support is not through ALSA but instead as part of the FFADO project. FFADO provides a userspace library for driving firewire audio devices in general and a JACK backend allowing such devices to be used by any jack-enabled software. An ALSA backend is planned but no work has been done towards this yet. Check out www.ffado.org for information on this project.

Device support in FFADO varies. Some interfaces for which we have vendor support are doing very well, while supporting an interface such as the MOTUs without any documentation is challenging. However, the MOTU control protocol is pretty well understood at this point in time and it is possible to actually use the MOTU firewire devices for real work under Linux (as I have been for about 9 months now). The trap is that one needs to use an earlier revision of ffado at present. Back in February some key FFADO infrastructure changed. From before that until the last week or so I've been busy with production projects and so haven't had a chance to update the MOTU FFADO driver and restore its functionality. I'm back on the case now though and hope to make progress in the next month or so.

If you want further details about all this please contact me off-list and I'll fill you in.

Best regards jonathan