This blog post might perhaps be useful to approx. four people over the next decade (but I’m probably exaggerating — more like two?), so if you don’t recognise all the words in the title here, you can skip this one. But if you’re googling and landed here: You’re welcome.
OK, this is the deal: There’s a DAC box called the RME Hammerface Multiface II (*phew*) that was made about 15 years ago. It’s really nice — it’s a matrix mixer thingie, all controlled from a computer in a very convenient way. I just use it for controlling the various speakers around my flat, which is overkill, but I’ve never found anything as convenient and stable for something like this, so I’m continuing to use it until it konks out. (And then I’m gonna be on ebay looking for a new one.)
So whenever my stereo computer needs an upgrade (or just breaks), I just plug get a new computer and plugs the RME PCI Express card into it, and there we are.
Here’s the newest iteration, installed yesterday…
But! The problem is that the card is so old that the Debian people have decided to not distribute the necessary firmware files any more. Which was problematic the previous upgrade, because that time the disk where the firmware files lived died, and I couldn’t just copy from the old computer to the new. But I found the files an old, old ftp site somewhere obscure.
This time around, I didn’t even find those — I can’t find these files anywhere on the internet. (It could be because Google sucks even more these days, but I dunno.) I had made a safety copy, which I meant to push to Microsoft Github, but I forgot.
This time I remembered. So if you one of the handful of people that need this file in, say, ten years time, you can find them there. (Unless Microsoft went bankrupt.)
Put them where hdsploader (from the alsa-firmware-loaders package in Debian Linux) can find them:
/usr/lib/firmware/hdsploader/multiface_firmware.bin /usr/lib/firmware/hdsploader/multiface_firmware_rev11.bin
And you’re good to go.
That’s all.