raspberry pi soundcard.

*walks onto stage, taps mic., looks around, takes deep breath*

...Well, it"s out. People are playing with it, working on getting various hardware/software bits and pieces working, reporting bugs and problems, etc...

The Pi is a triumph. Uniquely affordable, beautiful to look at, with graphics capabilities far beyond anything in it"s class, apart from one thing... the Pi seems to have crapped-out in the sound department. Drivers are buggy/not working so far, and it seems that when the time comes that they *are* stable and working, the output on the analogue Jack will be *not excellent* due to electrical noise on the circuits.

I propose a fix. Well, not so much a *fix* as an optional but desirable improvement. An improvement that will make the Raspberry Pi"s audible capabilities as legendary as it"s GPU - an add-on board, connected via GPIO, with a nice clean signal path, and a proper DAC. And that"s not all! *waggles finger towards the heavens*

*crowd murmurs, pregnant with anticipation*

...I propose this add-on board has a chip, probably Yamaha, that enables FM SYNTHESIS! WHO"S WITH ME? *crowd goes wild* SAY IT NOW! EFF EMM SYNTHESIS! EFF EMM SYNTHESIS! EFF EMM SYNTHESIS!

*departs the stage, crowd still chanting*

[Gert van Loo]

You want to have access to I2S for sound and unfortunately the GPIO pins are missing the pins for that. You could try a different interface but only SPI would be fast enough and that does not have a constant clock. So I think we have a little problem here.

Read the forums especially the one about "missing" and "I2S".

nnnNNNOOO!

...I know the GPIO is quick enough to send commands to an FM synth, at least... is there no way at all we could wangle this? Sample RAM?

Dammit my Vader tags didn"t work in that last post...