Alsa driver for Digigram miXart8 and miXart8AES/EBU soundcards	    Digigram <alsa@digigram.com>GENERAL=======The miXart8 is a multichannel audio processing and mixing soundcardthat has 4 stereo audio inputs and 4 stereo audio outputs.The miXart8AES/EBU is the same with a add-on card that offers further4 digital stereo audio inputs and outputs.Furthermore the add-on card offers external clock synchronisation(AES/EBU, Word Clock, Time Code and Video Synchro)The mainboard has a PowerPC that offers onboard mpeg encoding anddecoding, samplerate conversions and various effects.The driver don't work properly at all until the certain firmwaresare loaded, i.e. no PCM nor mixer devices will appear.Use the mixartloader that can be found in the alsa-tools package.VERSION 0.1.0=============One miXart8 board will be represented as 4 alsa cards, each with 1stereo analog capture 'pcm0c' and 1 stereo analog playback 'pcm0p' device.With a miXart8AES/EBU there is in addition 1 stereo digital input'pcm1c' and 1 stereo digital output 'pcm1p' per card.Formats-------U8, S16_LE, S16_BE, S24_3LE, S24_3BE, FLOAT_LE, FLOAT_BESample rates : 8000 - 48000 Hz continouslyPlayback--------For instance the playback devices are configured to have max. 4substreams performing hardware mixing. This could be changed to amaximum of 24 substreams if wished.Mono files will be played on the left and right channel. Each channelcan be muted for each stream to use 8 analog/digital outputs seperately.Capture-------There is one substream per capture device. For instance only stereoformats are supported.Mixer-----<Master> and <Master Capture> : analog volume control of playback and capture PCM.<PCM 0-3> and <PCM Capture> : digital volume control of each analog substream.<AES 0-3> and <AES Capture> : digital volume control of each AES/EBU substream.<Monitoring> : Loopback from 'pcm0c' to 'pcm0p' with digital volumeand mute control.Rem : for best audio quality try to keep a 0 attenuation on the PCMand AES volume controls which is set by 219 in the range from 0 to 255(about 86% with alsamixer)NOT YET IMPLEMENTED===================- external clock support (AES/EBU, Word Clock, Time Code, Video Sync)- MPEG audio formats- mono record- on-board effects and samplerate conversions- linked streamsFIRMWARE========For loading the firmware automatically after the module is loaded, usethe post-install command.  For example, add the following entry to/etc/modprobe.conf for miXart driver:	install snd-mixart /sbin/modprobe --first-time -i snd-mixart && \			   /usr/bin/mixartloader(for 2.2/2.4 kernels, add "post-install snd-mixart /usr/bin/vxloader" to /etc/modules.conf, instead.)The firmware binaries are installed on /usr/share/alsa/firmware(or /usr/local/share/alsa/firmware, depending to the prefix option ofconfigure).  There will be a miXart.conf file, which define the dsp imagefiles.The firmware files are copyright by Digigram SACOPYRIGHT=========Copyright (c) 2003 Digigram SA <alsa@digigram.com>Distributalbe under GPL.