Rivendell 2.x does NOT require ASI cards to get audio out, or to make it easier! I am surprised you guys resist keeping up and learning stuff as the world moves on. Anybody here remember the changes CMX and Ampex FORCED on the tech side of video editing? Linux is NOT hard. Get a copy of “Running Linux” or “Linux in a Nutshell” and find the time to do a little continuing education. You need to know this stuff. Linux is not going away.
All you need is an audio card that is supported by Linux. Lots of the older M-Audio and ASI cards are no longer supported in Linux. Again, with a “current” box, you don’t need any audio card to test things, if the motherboard has onboard audio.
The Rivendell documentation is not up-to-date, as there is only one primary developer. All documentation aside from the one operation manual is done solely by voluntary contributors. A lot of that is years out-of-date. There is hardly any documentation on v2.x, aside from the ‘be careful’ info on upgrading from 1.x to 2.x. Anything that says ASI is required or will ‘make things easier’ is way out-of-date. v2.x was released in time for the NAB, and Rivendell/Paravel had a booth there this year. Even with v1.x, you do not need any fancy audio card to test it out.
One of the things that has made audio more difficult in Linux, is they changed the whole sound architecture in the last few years. The improvements are immense, but you might need to read up on OSS and ALSA to iron out any difficulties you might be having. Again, a “current” box should install ALSA by default, but older boxes might default to OSS and give you problems. Learning the contents of config files is necessary for this. And make sure your reference books are current, as older books may not have the new info.
As I noted previously--NONE of the appliance iso’s are current. The developers promise a new one for v2.x, but not until CentOS 6 is released.
Also, another note of caution, the chief developer said yesterday that they are currently experimenting with changes to the Rivendell audio database (which runs on an Apache server installed with Rivendell), and there may be bugs in the latest CVS head releases, until they work their way through that. You might want to experiment with the stable release--although if you know your way around Linux, you might want to help him debug the changes.
Get on the Rivendell mailing list. There are some really competent people there, and they need more--one of the most knowledgeable recently changed jobs and no longer has time to help, and he responded daily many requests for help. One guy in London is really doing some nifty things with audio, including some different (and really cheap) methods of getting remote audio into his station via IP, and he is willingly sharing it all. Rivendell supports touch screen and GPIO devices and has its own macro language. Some of the game controllers people are tearing apart to use as GPIO input, are really weird and interesting.
Again, start with that PDF in my earlier post. It is not on the Rivendell/Tryphon site, but is the best documentation of how to compile and install the 2.x version of Rivendell I have seen.
My advice is don’t mess with v1.x. 2.x is a major advance in several ways. It supports 64-bit architecture (Linux had stable 64-bit long before Micro$oft), makes major changes to the way the audio database is handled, and completely eliminates the need for any special audio card (specifically ASI) as all encoding/decoding is now done with software, and will run on any audio card you can get running on Linux. No more work is being done on the 1.x version (although there are a ton of them still in operation); anything new will be on 2.x only.
