This is a CoreAudio driver that make REAC devices show up as audio interfaces within Mac OS X. At the moment, the driver acts as a REAC split device, which means that it is possible to listen to REAC devices, and they acknowledge the connection, so it is possible to use Roland's control software to change preamp settings etc without connecting the master device to another Roland unit.

The driver currently has several important limitations including that it only is tested with the S-1608, it is hard coded to split mode (even though incomplete support for master mode is implemented and a stub for slave mode is there). The driver is hard coded to listen to devices with 16 inputs. This limitation should not be difficult to remedy, but I see little benefit to doing so at the moment, since I only have access to the S-1608.

I have partly been able to reverse engineer the REAC protocol, and have succeeded to implement slave and master mode, but there is still at least one step left in the slave handshake. Additionally, this code is as dumb as possible with the metadata part of the REAC packets. It basically does nothing with it except when it's necessary to finish the connection handshake.

With more work, it should be possible to implement complete support for split mode. I do not think it is possible to create a satisfactory implementation of slave and master mode without changing the firmware of the REAC devices, because the operating system does not schedule control to the kernel extension thread sufficiently often to enable jitter free playback. To implement it, I'd probably add a special mode in the hardware devices where their internal buffer is lengthened to approximately 4ms.

When the extension is loaded (and not in master mode), it will listen to all ethernet network interfaces for REAC packets.

XCode is used to build the driver. The product, a directory called REAC.kext, will be located somewhere within the build directory, depending on your build settings. For development the scripts test/load.sh and test/unload.sh are useful (they are simple wrapper scripts around kextload).

To install the driver permanently, copy REAC.kext to /System/Library/Extensions

When the kernel extension is loaded, simply connect the network cable to the computer, and it should show up on the system preferences pane just like any other sound card.

This is not very thouroughly tested kernel code. Installing this code on your computer might make it crash, it might erase all the contents on your file system. Kernel code is even able to permanently damage the hardware of your computer.

I believe and hope that this code won't do any of these things, but there are no guarantees. Please see the file COPYING for further details.

This code (except Apple's PCMBlitterLib, which is optimized code to convert between floating and fixed point PCM data) is released under the General Public License version 3. See the file COPYING for the full license.