I noticed a while ago SSL supported the Ardour project, but was wondering what; if anything did they bring to project with regard to hardware support? I’m a big fan of SSL hardware and looking at getting the Duende soon, but looking through their website i don’t see any sort of linux support for any of the products they have, not so much their top of the range mixing consoles but the new cheaper project studio range.
I would have thought considering the they supported, and was interested in the development of the Ardour project in the past that they would have been the first to create drivers and hardware support of their product range on the Linux platform.
SSL’s participation with Ardour was really limited to paying Ardour’s lead developer (me) for about 9 months. They were (and I believe still are) interested in better Linux support for hardware like Duende, but this is mostly dependent on the FFADO project, since Duende is essentially just a firewire audio device (it does have a separate control stream too). I doubt if there is anyone at SSL right now who is actively working on Linux support, though I know that many of their engineers develop on Linux platforms and quite a few use Ardour privately.