Usb Audio (Stupid Question)

[thenexus]

Hello everyone,
first of all congratulations to the team of hardware/software developers for giving us such an awesome device (although it's not yet in my hands, with are burning with the holy fire of geekness).

Then, to my question. Will USB audio interfaces work with Pandora?

Let me say that I believe the answer is yes, but I would like the gods of open source to answer the question just to be sure.
The reason I believe it should work, but I am not sure, is that USB audio is well supported in the kernel (and Angstrom has a good kernel release rate), then because I believe that the audio currently uses ALSA (which is the missing piece of the equation).

The reason I am so interested is that I am a podcaster, and given the abundance of USB mics/XLR-to-USB/USB interfaces available, I would really like to slam in the Pandora a couple of 16 GiBs SDs and start recording on the go with a decent quality.

Thanks for your time.

 

[zhasha]

Simple answer: yes
Long answer: An application that does not let you choose your input/output will be a royal pain in the ass to use unless you use pulseaudio, which brings it's own problems (though they're nothing major for me at least). The problem is that while alsa can expose the holy grail of audio devices, if a specific application chooses to just use the first one that comes along, you have no simple way of just forcing it over to a different device (but pulseaudio does).

Kernel-wise, I'm pretty sure most audio devices are supported. I haven't found one yet that isn't at least

 

[rabidpoobear]

Pandora even has a mic built-in, so if you forget ALL your gear except the Pandora you'll still be able to record (albiet with less quality - mostly due to small electret mics being kinda lame, not the Pandora audio interface itself.) In fact if you record with low-impedance dynamic mics you could probably get away with just running it direct into the Pandora (no guarantees though, just a thought). obviously that wouldn't work for any condenser mic requiring phantom power.

I'm definitely going to be using my Pandora for a lot of audio-related activities. I'm looking forward to it!

 

[torpor]

Audio applications development, performance, porting and support is one of my primary interests with regards to Pandora. I already have a suite of apps - sequencer, synthesizer, recording - that I will be bringing to the Pandora platform as soon as I can, and I'm pretty well positioned to help in regards to making sure the Pandora OS can support musicians who want to use it as an audio device.

From the start, it should be possible to plug in class-compliant USB Audio devices and use them for playback and recording .. more advanced features, like Jack support, multi-client support, realtime, and so on will be added as we get a chance to start hacking on the software properly, with hardware in front of us. I imagine either the mainline Pandora OS will become more and more streamlined for audio applications, or we will see a slightly newer generation of bootable SD images released for the Pandora with specific application categories - such as realtime synthesis - supported.

The only thing we need is Pandora's in our hands, and a little group of synth/audio hackers are going to go mad on the Pandora as a musicians tool. I plan on using it in my studio rather extensively .. well, I've had that plan for years now, heh heh .. so lets see how things progress.