Any chance of getting old USB soundcard to work? (Roland UA-33 or Tri-Capture)

grandpa · 2026-04-15T11:17:24+0100

I have an old UA-33 that I like.

It's a reliable workhorse. Unfortunately it's old enough to not be USB compliant, ie it requires a driver. Roland at the time only made drivers for Windows and Mac.

Also, I don't know much about USB. Almost nothing apart from the occasional dd to create a memstick.

Inspired by this thread I plugged Roland into an old laptop running 15.0-RELEASE-p5 and I can see that it identifies correctly. If I run usbconfig list it lists the device with correct name Roland Tri-Capture!

Wonderful - there is hope!

But when I run cat /dev/sndstat there is nothing except the internal soundcard.

Some googling ensued and I found two interesting tidbits.

The reason the device is identified is probably because that the ALSA project added a bunch of Roland devices according to this link
This link (translated from .jp) claims that the device is working on Ubuntu 20.04 because of a commit to the Linux kernel in 2013

Quote from the translated .jp link. 　"By the way, I looked into the source code to find out why UA -11 works even in vendor-specific operating modes that are not USB Audio class compliant , and why UA -33, which is completely vendor-specific, also works . It seems that this was addressed in the following commit from 2013: kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree. This commit roughly contains some universal code that says, "Devices with a vendor-specific device class, a vendor ID of Roland or Yamaha , and that use isochronous for transfer mode are audio devices right? If we can identify the data format , we'll make them work as PCM devices." This allows a large amount of Roland and Yamaha equipment to work with ALSA *4 . As a result, it seems that snd-usb-audio's quirks-related source code can now work even without device-specific code for UA -11 and UA -33."

Is there any chance of making the Roland Tri Capture working on FreeBSD 15?

/grandpa

The Roland TRI-CAPTURE (UA-33) is a compact, 24-bit/96 kHz USB audio interface designed for mobile recording, podcasting, and streaming, featuring dedicated mic, guitar, and AUX inputs.