RapidRoad/Poseidon & USB audio

[roondar]

I'm not sure if anyone has experience with this or has posted about it before, but I recently installed a RapidRoad USB controller into my A1200. After verifying it works well for mass storage and the like I had a "wild" idea (well, wild for my standards anyway ).

How about using USB audio on it?

So I have two questions (apologies if they have been asked before, I did search but didn't find what I was looking for): first, does the RapidRoad USB through clockport actually support USB audio devices? And second, assuming it does, is there a tutorial or some such somewhere on how to get non-native audio working on WB3.1?

I've never had non-Paula audio on my Amiga so I'm not sure where to really start (something to do with AHI no doubt, but I never used that either). Thanks for any help

[trixster]

Usb audio works with Deneb which uses Poseidon, so it stands to reason that you could use one with a RapidRoad too.

[roondar]

Thanks
Now to find out how it all works...

[fluffkitten]

I have a very cheap generic usb "sound card" that I've plugged in to my RR which both Poseidon and AHI detect and set up. Haven't tried using it for anything though.

[fitzsteve]

Hi, yes it works but you need a fast CPU to decode it, anything under an 040@40mhz is too slow. Also the transfer speed is a bit slow so you might get skipping on the A1200, it works better on the Z3 bus with an XSurf/Rapid Road.

[Daedalus]

There's plenty of bandwidth on the clockport for a soundcard (the Prelude supports 64kHz apparently), so provided the USB overheads are reasonable and AHI drivers exist, it should work fine.

[roondar]

So far I've found that USB on RapidRoad via clockport isn't particularly quick, but it doesn't seem super slow either (honestly, the way the documentation was written I was almost expecting below floppy disk speeds for transfers and it's certainly much better than that).

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by roondar

So far I've found that USB on RapidRoad via clockport isn't particularly quick, but it doesn't seem super slow either (honestly, the way the documentation was written I was almost expecting below floppy disk speeds for transfers and it's certainly much better than that).

Something like 800 to 900k/sec isn't it? I did test mine previously with an A1200 and Blizzard 1230, it was to slow to drive the Audio but it did work on my Apollo 4040 in the A4000 and later when I upgraded the 1230 to a 1260 is worked just fine with the USB Audio, but I do recall there being some transfer speed issues, maybe a bottleneck with data.

[roondar]

Hmm, 800k/sec ought to allow for audio at up to 800KHz (mono/8 bit) or 68KHz (5.1/16 bit). So that's all a bit odd. It probably would have to be a latency issue then as that transfer rate itself is way above CD-Audio levels (which are only 150k/sec).

[fitzsteve]

I can't remember my tests exactly but I think I tried Quake with AHI Audio which was very stutterty, playing an emulator like ASP (Speccy) with AHI Audio was fine and playing an Mp3 with the 060 via AHI was fine, probably the CPU overhead of Quake was too much rather than a bandwidth issue but we don't know how the USB stack is working. What CPU do you have?

[roondar]

A 68030/50MHz

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by roondar

A 68030/50MHz

Ah, ok then its not fast enough sadly, I tried with a Blizzard 1230mkiv and it was too slow to do anything useful with the soundcard. Be interesting if you do get different results or find any AHI software that has little enough CPU overhead that it will work.

[johnnybarker]

I can confirm the Rapidroad works fine for audio via ahi with the £2.50 usb soundcards on ebay. At least until the nak10 timout errors kick in and the rapidroad self destructs in flames. So it goes...

[roondar]

Honestly, I'd be already be quite happy if all it did was play back some samples or perhaps the odd non-Amiga native mod type file. It's more about the experiment than about replacing Paula

[Daedalus]

"Because you can" is always a valid reason in Amigaland

[lord of time]

Originally Posted by johnnybarker

I can confirm the Rapidroad works fine for audio via ahi with the £2.50 usb soundcards on ebay. At least until the nak10 timout errors kick in and the rapidroad self destructs in flames. So it goes...

another dead rapidroad?