Firewire interfaces, mic pre's, basically how to set up a recording rig...

[pipelineaudio]

AFAIK, the problem with DICE II is that I think all the device vendors ship pretty much the stock TC Konnekt driver with their own device IDs instead of actually hiring driver engineers to maintain and enhance the drivers and send their changes back to TC Konnekt.

I know for sure that this is pretty much the case with at least one of them. I questioned the wisdom of giving a competitor with a vested interest in seeing you fail, the power to make or break your company.

 

[dgatwood]

I know for sure that this is pretty much the case with at least one of them. I questioned the wisdom of giving a competitor with a vested interest in seeing you fail, the power to make or break your company.

Heh. Well, it's pretty common to ship stock drivers from the chipset manufacturer these days. The only thing odd about it is that this particular chipset vendor also happens to build full blown interfaces---chipset vendors (e.g. Oxford Semi, BridgeCo, etc.) usually just build silicon, accompanying drivers, and reference implementations, but normally do not "productize" those reference implementations.

What usually ends up happening at that point is that the vendors then fix bugs and submit them upstream to the company, but the company often doesn't competently merge those fixes into the core version of the driver, so you end up with each vendor having their own slight variant branches, some of which work better than others in various respects. Over the course of years, that mess slowly straightens out.

With the chipset vendor also being a competitor, though, they probably have no real motivation to straighten things out for anyone else but themselves.... There's definitely an inherent conflict of interest there. I know depending on my competitor is certainly not a situation I'd want to get into (and particularly if I were building boutique products with limited market potential).

Of course, the manufacturers are still in charge of their own destiny at least as far as the software goes---AFAIK, TC does ship the source to the manufacturers, so if they really wanted to hire driver engineers to fix them, they could.... Unfortunately, with the number of fly-by-night manufacturers that just take the reference implementation, make minor tweaks in packaging (e.g. different numbers of inputs and outputs), outsource manufacturing to China, and outsource the driver maintenance to a driver writing company in India or whatever, the chances of any of the companies actually fixing bugs approaches zero these days....

Like I said... when Linux drivers come out, I think a lot of this mess will start to clear up as manufacturers say "Oh, you've just noted a bug in the core reference code and/or a discrepancy in the specification that we haven't fixed/handled/worked around and by fixing that issue in our drivers, they suddenly work better." Many eyes make all bugs shallow and all that....