Greetings!
Is there any progress on the request to modify the Bela (in this case the CTAG BEAST) as a simple USB Audio Interface?
It would be an amazing functionality to be able to utilise the Bela in this way.
My wish is to work in Max/MSP and recognize the Bela in the Audio Status as Input/Output device to work with the audio channels. I'm working on Mac.
Many thanks!
that's not possible, unfortunately.
Thanks for your quick reply! Could you expand a bit on its impossibility? What makes it impossible?
it kind of works for low channel counts, but I doubt it will get to 8 in and 16 out. Latency performance is going to be too high to be at all usable for live processing.
Here's the previous work:
https://github.com/BelaPlatform/bela-image-builder/issues/35#issuecomment-471772458
Thanks @giuliomoro.
Although in further capacities I wish to address all the possible i/o channels, for this specific project I would like to work with 5 input channels and 6 output channels. How would you foresee the latency? The processing will all be done in Max/MSP, Bela will only be used as interface.
Regarding your link. I'm working on Mac and not on Linux, can the reformatting of the Bela be done on my OS through the Terminal? I just have to shoot the lines of code to the Bela root?
latency is going to be in the tens of hundreds of milliseconds from the USB->ALSA link (can be shorter but would be unreliable), then you need a way to get that data out/in of the I/O. If using a Bela image, that can be done via this https://github.com/BelaPlatform/Bela-ALSA-bridge and there will be extra latency associated with it. There's no need to patch the kernel, because you wouldn't be able to use the MIN_PERIODS 1 option to your advantage (you'll need to use a larger number of periods for reliable performance).
Oh, in all of this there is no clock synchronisation: the USB soundcard will have one clock and the CTAG codec will have a different clock. They will drift over time and cause further problems.
@giuliomoro Thanks!
Regarding my second question:
I'm working on Mac and not on Linux, can the reformatting of the Bela be done on my OS through the Terminal? I just have to shoot the lines of code to the Bela root?
Is this all possible on MacOS, also downloading the requested ALSA drivers?
