alt Hacker NewsThis is an awesome project.
I have a long-in-the-tooth investment in Fireware audio devices (Presonus) in my studio - 19” rack interfaces with 10 I/O’s, as well as the StudioMix mixer with 20 or so .. I’ve been keeping an aging iMac around to use all of this with and it still just plain works, but having the option to replace it with an rPi is really appealing. The system is mostly used for tracking, so having REAPER on the rPi, connected to all that FireWire gear, just seems such a nice idea…
I wonder what the load will be like, though? Can the latest rPi with PCI hat and Firwire interface handle 40 channels of audio over FireWire, I wonder? I know the issue would mostly be SD-card write speeds and so on .. maybe this disqualifies the rPi - but certainly there are other ARM-based SBC’s that this same technique could be applied to ..
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I have a Focusrite Saffire that has lots of nice, quiet preamps and ADC channels. I managed to get an old Mac to connect over FireWire and using the Focusrite Control app, I configured the routing to map all the analog inputs to ADAT. That works great but it's always at the wrong sample rate, and I can't change that without getting the old Mac out. Maybe I'll look into one of these rPi shields too. Anyone got any reverse engineering tips for the control protocol?!
Replacement doesn't have to be a raspberryPI.
Out of curiosity, what version of the OS is that iMac running? Using it as essentially dedicated piece of audio equipment instead of a daily driver would be fine by me. I've done it with the 2012 cheese grater MacPros running 10.6 for eternity essentially as a dedicated video capture device. It just happens to look like a computer, but it remains in use for one singular purpose. No more updates. No WAN access.
Audio shouldn't be a big problem for the Pi unless you're pumping it through tons of heavy filters. The Pi 5's CPU can hold its own against 2010-2015 era iMacs, and a good microSD card easily holds 40-50 MB/sec writes.
For better performance, I'd plug in a USB SSD (USB 3.0 can put through 300 MB/sec or more), or even use built in Ethernet, good for writing 100 MB/sec out to a NAS or another networked computer.