there is no reason to wait for that. There is no technical reason why a USB DAC won't work with the n800.

Worst case scenario we have to install debian onto it. If we can get a standard debian install, the rest should be relatively trivial.

According to this post:
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ry/014077.html

it might be possible using the ALSA plugin:
http://hg-mirror.alsa-project.org/al...c/README-maemo

Have you tried that?

Practical comparison: n800 vs ipod shuffle (original pack of gum).

Pros for n800:
Uses SD cards, which can be changed. I have 18 GB on mine, compares with 0.5 GB for the shuffle.

There's a real display and real controls. You can have some idea what you're doing. Shuffle has three blinking lights.

Media Player remembers where you were last reliably. xmms has echo plug in if you want. Downloadable software might just give you something you want. xmms has equalizer, though it doesn't work for me. Maybe someday it will.

n800 can stream audio from terabyte desktop over wifi, and sounds good through home stereo. Better than many pc laptops, which often introduce noise when the disk drive or cd drive moves.

n800 has built in speakers for when you don't feel like headphones, or want to have a small group listen to something. Speakers aren't really loud enough for most restaurants and other public places. Portable powered speakers are available.

n800 can show video.

Pros for the shuffle:
With the same headphones, the ipod shuffle can kick out higher volume sound. This can be important while driving, depending on road noise and content.

The shuffle's buttons can be operated with one hand while driving. Not so much for the n800.

Shuffle is light enough that it can be left hanging from it's audio chord. It's abusable. n800 is delicate and must be protected.

The 3 year old shuffle's batteries last more 12 hours of continuous use. The n800 does more like 5. n800 could be extended with external battery pack, or spare batteries.

===

For sound quality under good conditions with the same content, they are very similar.

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I use the shuffle in my car alot.

Anyone wonder why the power plug is right next to the analog Audio jack?

Greetings

jolouis did you ever manage to get the usb audio out working?

I am in possesion of a ray samuels predator and am thinking of buying an internet tablet.

Where are you located, perhaps I can lend you my predator for testing. Only if your in Australia though hehe.

Im greatly interested in your progress!

Ive used the n800 with the peachtree audio DECCO tube amplifier with built in usb
I was unable to plug it into any speakers at hte time though
it did show up on dmesg and whe n iplugged the same unti into my ubuntu desktop it worked automagically

ps next time im up at my audio shop, im going to test out working with a bel canto e.One Dac3
if it works, throw in some usher s520s and MITs i gaurentee that I can a damn near invisable sound image for under 2 large, all in a box smaller than a microwave (closest anology I could think of...)
the deccos nice, but bel canto is my favorite DAC

Unfortunately I've been very preoccupied with other projects and while this one has been on the back burner for a while I really haven't had a chance to get to it. The good news is though that in some research for a completely unrelated project I stumbled across some interesting information relating to the tablets and their audio subsystem. Two important points to note: First, from the documentation I've seen, apparently the tablets run ESD to handle all the audio routing on the device; that would explain why even if your USB audio device is recognized, it's not actually used for audio out. The good news here though is that theoretically you should be able to tell ESD to output to the USB device instead of the native DSP... I don't know much about ESD but it shouldn't be that hard to figure out. I also noticed that ALSA seems to have some extra maemo support in the latest versions, so that may come in handy as well. Anyways, I'll try to get to it again shortly...

-Rob

I've been wanting to try using my n800 with a usb-audio device for a while now, my Etymotic earbuds just don't sound very good with the n800 unless I use an amp...

Anyway, I was eventually able to get usb-audio working, but it wasn't easy, at least for me. (I used an Xitel HiFi Link AN1 for testing.)

I had to build the usb audio kernel modules and copy over some of the other alsa modules:

snd-rawmidi.ko, snd-usb-lib.ko, snd-hwdep.ko, snd-page-alloc.ko, snd-timer.ko, snd-pcm.ko, snd-usb-audio.ko

This got me to the point where I could see usb audio card in /proc/asound, but I was unable to play any music through it.

I ended up having to compile the latest versions of alsa-lib and alsa-plugins to get things working. In the process I managed to make my flash-card install unbootable for a while, by not completely replacing the old libraries... The watchdog thingie will reboot the device if multimediad crashes.

Now I can send music to the usb device with:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 music.wav

I haven't tried getting this to work with any other media players yet.

So it works, but it's not very easy to get working. I don't have a debian installation for my n800 yet, but I imagine this would be a much easier way to go.

I'm so glad i am not the only one at this point, it has been driving me mad for some time now.
That's great news, do you have any advice on how to ensure these libs are removed cleanly?

Thanks.

Well, unfortunately I have some setbacks to report... After replacing the alsa libraries, the built-in sound has stopped working and my n800 will reboot when I play some types of sound files. Something's probably causing a kernel panic.

On the bright side I've noticed some maemo specific flags in the alsa-lib ./configure so maybe all is not lost.

If you are going to try this I'd recommend taking multimediad and esd out of your startup scripts to avoid reboot loops.

To move the libraries out of the way I moved /usr/lib/libasound* and /usr/lib/alsa-lib to a temporary directory.