Hi guys!
Well, we were inches from the finish line with our new radio automation system,
and starting to tease its release. It has been running smooth as butter and
playing back beautifully for weeks, and then went to finish things up for
distribution and discovered we still have some show-stopping media problems
when working with the HDA motherboard audio and accompanying Haiku driver:
1. When booting up, media_server isn’t immediately ready for action.
Sometimes it’s literally MINUTES before it’s ready…and if we start trying to
play music sooner than that in the automation, it totally messes up
media_server (not a crash with debug, just a total lack of
responsiveness)...and usually requires a reboot (not just a restart of media
services) to get audio back. And even then, sometimes there’s no audio after
the reboot. Corrupted settings at that point or something? No idea.
2. Even when things have been running smoothly for a long time, if we do need
to reboot to switch to another test partition or something, there’s a media
crash with debug message while shutting down...accompanied a confirmation
button that says “Oh no,” which is pretty much what the customer would be
thinking too.
3. With Cedric’s revised HDA driver, we can address more than one output, but
when we broadcast to “Output 1," use of the default “Output 0" can cause
instability in the media server. This one is the least of our immediate
troubles, though somehow we really need to get stable access to two HDA outputs
so there’s one for broadcast output, and one for listening to things “off the
air."
We thought much of this was behind us, but we must have just had a run of good
luck for awhile, and now we’re seeing them again, and we’ve had to pull the
emergency brake on our release. Discouraging, because in EVERY OTHER RESPECT,
Haiku 64 bit has been just fantastic, extremely stable for us, runs and runs
and runs. Multitasks like a dream. I’m serious, it’s fantastic for us in
every other respect.
We feel like we’re so incredibly close, yet because of media issues, so far.
If we can get these problems solved, we can plan on a very long and terrific
run on Haiku with our beautiful new system, and that’s totally what we want to
do. If we can’t, we’ll have to try our luck with Genode or something else,
which I’d really hate to resort to after 20 years of sticking with it on on
BeOS and Haiku.
What’s needed is just that we somehow solve these problems, especially #1,
hopefully also #2 because it looks bad when it happens. Maybe the solution is
complex, maybe it’s one digit that’s wrong in the code somewhere (wouldn’t THAT
be nice?!!).
What I’m going to propose is a bounty of $750 to the person who can solve #1,
and $250 to the person who can solve #2. Plus, a $500 gift to Haiku’s
development fund if we can solve both. And since solving those things will
make us viable so we can actually do business, we’ll also donate a percentage
of our yearly sales to the Haiku project on an ongoing basis, to help advance
it into the future. But whatever we do, we’ll need to decide pretty quickly,
so I’m hoping we can have our discussion, get this into the right hands to
solve it, and try to make it happen before too much more time goes by.
For any discussion of the technical particulars, please contact Cedric Degea,
ttcoder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx . If I can help with anything in the way of testing,
providing reports, debug info, etc., you can write to me at
tunetrackersystems@xxxxxxxxx . You can also call me at 920-672-8244.
Thanks for all the amazing work you guys have been doing, and for working at it
so devotedly, for so long. As I said, Haiku has never been better in all other
respects…it’s like driving a fast, reliable sports car for us!
Dane
TT Systems
