I’ve been using Ardour a a few years now, and really love it.
As a Mackie D8B user, I was wondering if Ardour could be used/customised to actually control the Mackie D8B instead of the proprietry Mackie OS?
The D8B is an amazing mixing desk and has a huge user base, but is now sadly unsupported. It runs from a dedicated Pentium based box which controls all the DSP and plugins on the hardware mixer.
There is a huge interest in a new OS for the D8B and was just wondering if this is at all feasible.
It would not be impossible to install linux on the D8B. however, the task of figuring out how to control the DSP’s and mechanics on the rest of the PCB’s in there is likely to be an immense task if Mackie weren’t interested in giving out specs (which I suspect they are not). Its also not clear how you could do this in a “safe” way (i.e. without wrecking your ability to boot back into the Mackie OS).
What might be interesting is to rip out the existing mobo and install a new one. If all else fails, reinstall the old mobo and pray you didn’t stomp on any EEPROM or SRAM anywhere
