I was very excited to open up my new Native Instruments Audio4DJ soundcard today, but when I plugged it in I found out the wool they're pulling over their customers eyes. With 4.5 it shows up as ugen0 at uhub0 port 1 "Native Instruments Audio 4 DJ" rev 2.00/0.92 addr 3 which, you'll note, is NOT a uaudio(4).
The latest ALSA appearently supports it with sound/usb/caiaq (e.g. http://tomoyo.sourceforge.jp/cgi-bin/lxr/source/sound/usb/caiaq/), so that means that it won't Just Work on Windows, Mac, or Linux without installing drivers. I'm writing though because I don't know enough about the various USB standards at play here; I'm writing to ask if I should return it or not. Is there a chance in hell that BSD (or even *BSD) would grow support for this card? Is the linux driver a hack or does "caiaq" mean some new standard that may some day be supported? (googling turned up only references to the driver itself). Proprietary devices are so frustrating, so paying-to-be-a-slave. I don't want to do that unless there's a good reason for it. A friend suggests that USB soundcards by default are "cpu driven" so there's a lower bound on the latency that can be achieved, but again I don't know enough about this area to judge that for myself, and I don't know where I'd start researching it. Thanks for any insight at all. -Nick
