Open Source Drivers For Devices w/ Mulitiple Audio Inputs?

krystal_blade asks: "I've seen a couple of proprietary recording systems (for phone lines) made by Denro and Stancil that have the capability to record over 40 channels of audio simultaneously. They run around 25K $$ to own, and tech support is atrocious (around 250 dollars a half hour) These programs are almost all integrated into Microsoft-based operating system. Is there currently an open source solution to this? (As a side note, I'm also looking for a Linux compatibility solution to mulitiple channel audio boards)"

Telephony cards

[Chris Hiner]

If this is for phone quality recording, you could use a telephony board, like ones from Dialogic, Natural Microsystems, Pika...
I know that Dialogic makes 16 channel analog, and 48 channel digital (T1) cards, and has Linux/SCO/Unixware/Sun drivers.
I havn't checked lately to see what platforms they've been ported to, but NMS opensourced their drivers a while ago...
See:
http://www.dialogic.com/
http://www.linuxtelephony.org/
http://www.nmss.com/

Chris

Linux audio cards, software, and oponions

[OmegaDan]

A company named Hammerfall makes digitial audio cards with alsa drivers .. they're 24/96 and have an outrageous number of inputs. 24 if I recall on the 600$ model ... I can't find the link but you can find em on sweetwater.com or several other music retailers.

Echo Audio also makes excellent cards, but I think the support for them is very beta (www.echoaudio.com) ...

When your done, you hook them up to Ardor http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardour/ , and you've got a nice multitrack ... If that wasn't what you wanted then your on your own :)

For pro audio though, don't even think about using linux, its just not ready for prime time. OD - the humble guys music

drivers

[divbyzero]

The way you approach the problem will depend on whether you're primarily interested in telephony or audio. The concepts are similar, but the hardware and drivers come from different sources, and are optimized quite differently.

I can't provide any suggestions from the telephony side, but if you're interested in multichannel audio, check out the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) [alsa-project.org] project. Unlike the older "OSS" sound drivers for Linux, ALSA has a significant amount of support for multichannel audio hardware. Although it is not a particularly mature project, it is reasonably well supported, and is used by nearly the entire professional audio community under Linux (such as it may be).

But my grandest creation, as history will tell,