Hi all,
concerning the RME and ALSA issue, there now is another solution:
I got the new RME card and since jack doesnt't work properly on my laptop, got the idea to adapt pd to use Bill Schottstaedt's sndlib for better ALSA compatibility. Stefan Kersten helped and wrote the patch 3 weeks ago. It works without any problems (I used it in 2 concerts and a 1 week installation workshop).
The patch makes pd work with all cards, which work with the snd program of Bill Schottstaedt (also the RME 9652). For the Hammerfall to work you have to set an environment variable $SNDLIB_ALSA_PLAYBACK_DEVICE to "default:0,0". This is an ALSA software layer which converts the interleaced samples into non inteleaved. And of course you need to have the sndlib installed.
I could send the patch but would prefer Stefan doing it, as it's his work and he only sent me a preliminary hack shortly before I had to head off for the workshop.
Yours, Orm
P.S.: It might be a good idea to add a configure flag like --with-sndlib to compile pd against this library for future releases as it seems to be a cleaner interface to ALSA than the old pd code.