TOPIC: MiniDSP 2x4HD under Linux

I recently bought a MiniDSP 2x4HD and wanted to use it on my Linux box, so I inspected the way the plugin was communicating with the device. After configuring it using OSX, I've managed to write a small utility to send the right USB/HID commands to perform some basic actions (control gain/mute/source).

It can be installed with npm - make sure to grab a recent version of node (6.x)

Then you can do a quick check to see if audio is coming through:


It's possible to change pretty much any configuration parameter but because the plugin doesn't read back from the device, you can't really mix different programs to configure the same box. Volume/Mute seems to be the exception to this - most probably due to the physical volume knobs changing the same settings.

This could also be used on embedded platforms like raspberry pi or others - so it could switch the input to USB before playing audio.

Let me know if you find it useful

Code and instructions are on github.com/mrene/node-minidsp

@ Mrene

heheh.. This is nice... It sounds like you got busy... This is the first time we got someone going to that level.. It's neat!
We don't have Linux support for our plugin unfortunately (we're already overloaded doing Win x 6 OS versions, Mac x 6 OS versions) but we love to see that level of creativity. Hoping your 2x4HD is rocking and have fun!

DevTeam

It works quite well - only weird thing is that channel 3 and 4 were swapped out (the physical port for 4 has the software output channel 3, and vice-versa).

Stumbling upon the iOS application I added a "proxy command" so it relays port 5333 to USB just like the application does - this makes the application work for remote control. I can even use the plugin on a different machine altogether by locally forwarding :5333 to the box which runs the proxy before starting the plugin (it tries to connect before launching the helper).

The plugin itself runs under the (now deprecated) linux air runtime, but it doesn't attempt to connect locally because it doesn't know what to do under Linux. If it were to, let's say, ignore OS-specific rules and try to connect anyways - it could work without too many changes I suspect that's what the "home theater" plugins must do, since they accept connections over the network.

@ mrene

You're getting quite close..
Some hints: the minidsp.exe bridge under Win is what translate IP to USB commands basically (Air isn't USB friendly). I'd expect that Linux would do similar.

devTeam