The FFADO project aims to provide a free driver implemenation for
FireWire (IEEE1394, iLink) based (semi-) professional audio
interfaces. The focus of the project are on audio/music production
rather than consumer audio. This means that, although we intend to
supported all features at some point, consumer features are
considered less important. The most obvious example of a consumer
feature is AC3/DTS passthrough support, which is unsupported at
the moment.
libffado requires libiec61883, libxml++ and scons, also available
from SlackBuilds.org