This driver is being developed on the initiative of Piotr Makowski (oponek@gmail.com) and financed by Lars Bergmann.
Development is carried out by Rainer Zimmermann (mail@lightshed.de).
ESI provided a sample Maya44 card for the development work.
However, unfortunately it has turned out difficult to get detailed programming information, so I (Rainer Zimmermann) had to find out some card-specific information by experiment and conjecture. Some information (in particular, several GPIO bits) is still missing.
This is the first testing version of the Maya44 driver released to the alsa-devel mailing list (Feb 5, 2008).
The following functions work, as tested by Rainer Zimmermann and Piotr Makowski:
- playback and capture at all sampling rates
- input/output level
- crossmixing
- line/mic switch
- phantom power switch
- analogue monitor a.k.a bypass
The following functions *should* work, but are not fully tested:
- Channel 3+4 analogue - S/PDIF input switching
- S/PDIF output
- all inputs/outputs on the M/IO/DIO extension card
- internal/external clock selection
*In particular, we would appreciate testing of these functions by anyone who has access to an M/IO/DIO extension card.*
Things that do not seem to work:
- The level meters ("multi track") in 'alsamixer' do not seem to react to signals in (if this is a bug, it would probably be in the existing ICE1724 code).
- Ardour 2.1 seems to work only via JACK, not using ALSA directly or via OSS. This still needs to be tracked down.
The Maya44 card (or more exactly, the Wolfson WM8776 codecs) allow a maximum sampling rate of 192 kHz for playback and 92 kHz for capture.
As the ICE1724 chip only allows one global sampling rate, this is handled as follows:
* setting the sampling rate on any open PCM device on the maya44 card will always set the *global* sampling rate for all playback and capture channels.
* In the current state of the driver, setting rates of up to 192 kHz is permitted even for capture devices.
*AVOID CAPTURING AT RATES ABOVE 96kHz*, even though it may appear to work. The codec cannot actually capture at such rates, meaning poor quality.
I propose some additional code for limiting the sampling rate when setting on a capture pcm device. However because of the global sampling rate, this logic would be somewhat problematic.
The proposed code (currently deactivated) is in ice1712.h.patch, ice1724.c and maya44.c (in pci/ice1712).