Ubuntu, Firewire and Music

[Thad E Ginathom]

Warning: unless you have a very specific interest in the subject, you will find that this is one of the most boring things I've ever posted on the net. And that's saying something!

We touched on Linux issues in another interesting thread on PCs as an alternative to CD players.

I can understand a professional getting it together with Jack. There is some great music studio software for Linux, and, for a pro, it could be well worth while to spend the time tweaking those settings and getting it set up right. Honestly, I can't be bothered. My boxed Audiofire is a monument to that.

I unboxed it again yesterday, and have spent about a day in total messing around with it. I've had a silent house to myself for a couple of days. Just right for the task!

I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 in a separate partition. It doesn't even recognise that I have a firewire card :sad:. I also found adjustments to the desktop unstable, and it was a general pain, not only in the neck. This could be because I started off with an early-version image and updated from there. Some other day, I'll download a new image. Several hours, and several hundred Mb of bandwidth wasted.

Reverting to my usual 10.04 (with Ubuntu Studio additions) I thought I'd give it a try, fired up Jack, started VLC, plugged in the headphones (having failed to find the right cables for the speakers) and ... hey, it sounded nice. Nicer than my beloved RME, but jack is not stable.

Today, I dug deep for the TRS<--->TRS balanced cables that I must have bought just for this device, and confirmed that it sounded good on the speakers too, but still problematic with occasional drop outs, and, even if that were to happen even once an hour or so, it would still be unacceptable. The cheapest, nastiest kit at least plays a CD from beginning to end!

Taking time off from trying to improve matters with the jack parameters (one can vary it between silence and complete distortion!) I applied the question, "What's the point, if I can't, for example, listen to flash audio on the internet? It is one thing to get it working with programmes that can be told to output to it, but what about Firefox, Youtube, BBC, etc, etc, etc."

That took a bit of googling, and a bit of trial and error. Anyone with similar needs should start at the Jackaudio FAQs. I tried a couple of different approaches, but settled on the one described here: Jack and Loopback device as Alsa-to-Jack bridge. Yes, it is techie to the point of adding a load-at-boot-time module to the kernel, but, for the most part, the command-line and scripting stuff can be copied or cut&pasted from the instructions in that link. I don't pretend to understand just what I was doing!

I found the answers to some technical how-to questions (but hey, it was a world away from plugging something in and installing the drivers in Windows) and that was satisfying, but the result is still unusable. Even when it is playing nicely, any video output screws it up. Even scrolling up and down a web page.

1. I did turn off all the Compiz 3-d effects and stuff, but it may still be clashing with the proprietary video drivers.

2. The next step would be to start on the ladder of low-latency and then realtime kernels. This is much scarier than loading modules.

3. It might be my hardware.

4. It might be my face!

The next chapter... one day maybe...

 

[ajinkya]

And this is exactly why, even though i respect and like the Unix/Linux architecture, philosophy, and API, I have completely switched over to 64-bit Win7, which is the most stable and fast of any OS I have used till date. It also helps to have a powerful computer to run it on

I feel your pain, Thad...we had to go through similar trials when getting an embedded firewire camera to work on our Linux platforms. We finally switched to WinCE (and now WinXP embedded, heavily optimised and lightweight)!

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Well, thanks for reading, and sharing the pain.

I have decided that I am never likely to go back to Windows. It is just not what I want to sit in front of. This little Audiofire 2 is cute, though.

Anyway, at least the ancient RME pci card works, so it's not as if I don't have sound.

I'm going to delete my 11.04 partition and have a go with Tango Studio That comes with a choice of kernels...

 

[gobble]

I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 in a separate partition. It doesn't even recognize that I have a firewire card :sad:.

With Windows there is a certified h/w program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing) that manufacturers are eager to sign up for commercial/sales reasons. They are also eager to spend money on hiring programmers to write MS certified drivers. Unfortunately with Linux its a hit and miss until a programmer notices there's a product like yours lying around that might need a driver.

I also found adjustments to the desktop unstable, and it was a general pain, not only in the neck. This could be because I started off with an early-version image and updated from there. Some other day, I'll download a new image. Several hours, and several hundred Mb of bandwidth wasted.

11.0.4 is the latest stable release. Unless you have an alpha release...

Please do not jump anything beyond an LTS.

With 8.0.4 I had enough trying time to write a blog titled "Ubuntu hall of shame!"

I just installed 11.0,4 last fortnight after a whole year without a desktop. I updated my 9.0.4 to 10.x to 11.0.4 when I realixzed I no longer have an IDE port for a CD on my new mobo. Thanked my stars that I found I would never install a linux distro again - its so easy to to simply let it upgrade itself.

Yes in circa 2011 I find that a major linux distro like Ubuntu 11.0.4 cannot log out a user and log back in without hanging on a black screen with only mouse cursor seen. Yeeech! :sad: windows could do that since version 3.1 in the late 80s/early90s hyeah:

Taking time off from trying to improve matters with the jack parameters (one can vary it between silence and complete distortion!) I applied the question, "What's the point, if I can't, for example, listen to flash audio on the internet? It is one thing to get it working with programmes that can be told to output to it, but what about Firefox, Youtube, BBC, etc, etc, etc."

You can install medubuntu pack to get all those forbidden non-opensource media like Apple QT/H.264/RTSP and Flash RTMP to play.

No need to load and unload any drivers AFAIK.

I found the answers to some technical how-to questions (but hey, it was a world away from plugging something in and installing the drivers in Windows) and that was satisfying, but the result is still unusable. Even when it is playing nicely, any video output screws it up. Even scrolling up and down a web page.

1. I did turn off all the Compiz 3-d effects and stuff, but it may still be clashing with the proprietary video drivers.

What graphics chip? Driver? is your 11.04 up to date or still alpha?

The next step would be to start on the ladder of low-latency and then realtime kernels. This is much scarier than loading modules.

3. It might be my hardware.

4. It might be my face!

The next chapter... one day maybe...

Thats part of the fun isn't it?

Anyways all said I can both empathize and sympathize with you. hyeah:

--G0bble

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

With Windows there is a certified h/w program (WHQL Testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) that manufacturers are eager to sign up for commercial/sales reasons. They are also eager to spend money on hiring programmers to write MS certified drivers. Unfortunately with Linux its a hit and miss until a programmer notices there's a product like yours lying around that might need a driver.

My audiofire is supported by ffado. Just noticed that even the mixer/controller works in 11.04 (but not in 10.04)

11.0.4 is the latest stable release. Unless you have an alpha release...

Please do not jump anything beyond an LTS.

It is sometime since I downloaded it. I think it is an early 11.04 --- which the updates should have sorted out, and most of it seemed to get updated in one huge download session

... windows could do that since version 3.1 in the late 80s/early90s hyeah:

I have no doubts about Windows. It spoilt my life. It also made my career, as it made a department necessary where there had only been two of us. At least that meant I could delegate the dreadful business of Windows fault finding...

By the time I had to have much to do with Windows, I was used to 386s being multi-user, multitasking machines. That's one of the reasons that I find it so funny hearing people here saying that audio machines need massive processors and huge amounts of memory. of course, video might...

Microsoft lowered the bar of people's expectations of computers massively.

You can install medubuntu pack to get all those forbidden non-opensource media like Apple QT/H.264/RTSP and Flash RTMP to play.

No need to load and unload any drivers AFAIK.

It is not a question of drivers or codecs. It is a matter of getting non-jack-aware applications to play through Jack, and thus get access to the Firewire device. I still think that firewire audio has to through jack

What graphics chip? Driver? is your 11.04 up to date or still alpha?

ATI Radeon HD 4290. In 10.04, I have the proprietary drivers loaded because that allows the fun stuff with compiz cubes and the like, but it is another Ubuntu pain to get sorted. 11.04 shoudl be up to date now, but I seem to have broken some of the windowing stuff. I had 11.04 in a VM, but that is no good for testing audio hardware.

Latest is that I just had another trial session in 11.04, and it played very well. Jack reported "Xruns" but they were not audible.

I do not really want to upgrade my 10.04, yet... it is too tweaked and I don't care for redecoration!

Thats part of the fun isn't it?

Yep.

 

[gobble]

It is not a question of drivers or codecs. It is a matter of getting non-jack-aware applications to play through Jack, and thus get access to the Firewire device. I still think that firewire audio has to through jack

Part of the challenge is that firewire is almost obsolete for the desktop pc - thanks to apple's licensing cost. It is unlikely much time and effort will be invested in sprucing up support for the technology.

ATI Radeon HD 4290. In 10.04, I have the proprietary drivers loaded because that allows the fun stuff with compiz cubes and the like, but it is another Ubuntu pain to get sorted. 11.04 shoudl be up to date now, but I seem to have broken some of the windowing stuff. I had 11.04 in a VM, but that is no good for testing audio hardware.

I run 4250 on a 880G chipset. I've had no problems with my desktop.

I do not really want to upgrade my 10.04, yet... it is too tweaked and I don't care for redecoration!

Yep.

An update without reinstallation will retain your settings. I upgraded from a 780G to 880G mobo. It was a pleasant surprise that my 9.0.4 booted at first power-up when all I was doing was checking if I had plugged in the chassis power button wires correctly into the mobo.

Then I let it upgrade itself while I stepped out to a local coffee joint and when I was back, I had a pristine 11.0.4. (Yes I happened to be around for a few mouse-click prompts for upgrade to 10.x first).

All my window decorations and settings appear to be intact.

HTH
--G0bble

 

[allajunaki]

I think I'am one of the people who are linux fans.
During my college days, I used to compile my own Kernels optimized to my desktop. I even did some scripting to hack my ISP (to boost my connection speeds from 64kbps to 640kbps).
So, when I wanted to build a HTPC with a hand me down core2Duo PC, I chose Linux without skipping a beat.

HOWEVER, after spending a good month of my time, doing everything including switching kernels, and distribution, and what not, I was unable to get a stable HDMI link between my
PC <-> Onkyo <-> TV.

1080p/24hz was skipping frames, or tearing.
Bitstreaming only worked with one app, but had screen tearing (Boxee). When I switched to another app (XMBC), I had good video but no Bitstreaming.

Finally after a lot of hair tearing, I finally installed windows 7. Now I'm planning to set up rest of the stuff for making it to HTpC. Windows Media Center does a fantastic job, especially if modified right. With ffdshow plugins, Iam able to bitstream audio, now I need to find a way to get to 1080p/24hz.

Linux works well for most of the part. But some of the stuff needed for HTPC aspect is still fidgety. Windows gives you frustration free experience, but limits your flexibility.

Linux is always full of knobs and controls. Unfortunately no one tells you what most of the knobs does, internet is of some help, but most of the times you figure it yourself.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Part of the challenge is that firewire is almost obsolete for the desktop pc

A lot of pro and semi-pro audio stuff is firewire. How do handycams interace to PCs these days? It used to be ...Firewire. My 7-yr-old Sony requires it, and even though it is rarely used, that decrees a motherboard with firewire, and I didn't have too much trouble finding one. I've also bought add-in firewire cards, for PC and laptop, and they didn't cost a great deal.

An update without reinstallation will retain your settings. I upgraded from a 780G to 880G mobo. It was a pleasant surprise that my 9.0.4 booted at first power-up when all I was doing was checking if I had plugged in the chassis power button wires correctly into the mobo.

I did a new installation on a new HDD for my new machine. Then I put the HDD from the old machine in it --- and discovered that I could boot Linux from it! Not Windows, of course, oh no.

Then I let it upgrade itself while I stepped out to a local coffee joint and when I was back, I had a pristine 11.0.4. (Yes I happened to be around for a few mouse-click prompts for upgrade to 10.x first).

Useful and good to know.

Finally after a lot of hair tearing, I finally installed windows 7. Now I'm planning to set up rest of the stuff for making it to HTpC. Windows Media Center does a fantastic job, especially if modified right. With ffdshow plugins, Iam able to bitstream audio, now I need to find a way to get to 1080p/24hz.

That's kind-of sad.

Windows gives you frustration free experience

Oh no... that I cannot agree to . It is true that the frustration levels have declined substantially since W2K, though.

Linux is always full of knobs and controls. Unfortunately no one tells you what most of the knobs does, internet is of some help, but most of the times you figure it yourself.

Yes, that is literally true. Take the Jack control, for instance. What does some of that stuff even do? What does the display mean?

the buttons are self-explanatory and have tooltips.

Gee, thanks, manual writers!

Unix had a heavy emphasis on documentation, and an early culture of making sure that the program did what the man page said it did. If not, one or the other was changed. I guess FSF have maintained the tradition of man pages, but the developers of a lot of the graphic-front-end stuff seem to just leave us to get on with it.

 

[quad]

Interesting read (really!). Do keep it updated.

Another hardcore linux fan here (using since early 1995) - haven't
needed to boot into the windoze partition for years.
There was a time when I needed to use Windows for some office
work, and was able to get it working in a vm with Xen, so was still
using linux!

Camcorders these days use USB, I am told. My ancient one uses
firewire too.

 

[xiro]

I wish I could have some more time in life to create a HTPC distro for guys who do have interest but couldn't use it because of problem X or Y.

I also been using since personally since 1995 (slackware floppy diskette) and professionally since 1999 (sometime had to work on other unix variant) but no wind--ozee since then. I have created my first HTPC in 2006 using LFS and till date been maintaining and updating the same. But it's really not clean and simple to be shared across group of users who simply want to install do a bit of configuration and get going.

Maybe in future when I get some more personal time, I would definitely try to create an end user usable linux HTPC distro.

Regards ....

 

[allajunaki]

Having said that Linux is not complete writeoff. My wife's netbook uses Linux ( Well it came with windows, but I prefer ubuntu on that). Even she prefers the linux over windows on netbook.

Even at work, I have cygwin on windows system. And I use GNU Screen, rather than mulitiple putty windows. I think in work environments they do a bloody fantastic job. A lot of my colleagues have been surprised by the power of pipes. You can quickly sort and filter data by chaining commands.

Anyways, I just wanted to highlight that I have not completely given up linux Just that rather than being strongly biased on either OS, I embrace both for what they really are

Anyways, this thread is going off topic (or rather, Im going off topic).

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Linux is not at all a right off. I intend to continue using it now, and have, I hope, left the Microsoft road for ever.

There is no real problem with using supported pci or USB sound interfaces

It is as "plug'n'play" as Windows.

Some of the functionality present in manufacturer-supplied driver/software may not be there in third-party Linux support, but, unless you are unlucky with your hardware, you can install Linux and play music.

The problem is with Firewire devices

because there is no plug'n'play, and your device will remain silent until you discover that you must run an intermediate program, jack, and that there is a heap of configuration and several hours of googling and, even then, it might not work.

Jack, the audio connection kit, does far more than talk to firewire drivers, and will output to any other Linux sound driver. It is "patch panel" that the studio user can use to wire together different applications. Probably, in this respect, it is fantastic --- once the hurdles of getting stable sound out of it have been overcome.

As an aside, I learnt something yesterday that I should probably have known twenty years ago --- that you cannot have more than 4 primary partitions on a DOS partition table. I suppose I just never tried before! My first HDD has a WinXP partition; most of my data is in two ntfs partitions on a 1tb drive, and the third disk also has an ntfs partition. As I want to install at least a couple more Linuxes to test, I had to scrap my temporary 11.04 install and make a big extended partition that I can create logical partitions in to do those installs. Thank god (or Linux!) for GParted

The underlying firewire audio drivers are from ffado. I don't know why I can't just output from a media player to the driver, without jack. Am I missing a great big slap-on-the-forehead something here?

in 11.04, by the way, the ffado mixer detected my Audiofire and gave me the mix and device controls for it. In 10.04, it says it can't talk to dbus.


Disclaimer: personal experience of different versions as per my setups on my machine. Others may not have anything like my problems. They may have no problem at all --- or different ones!

Quick late-night try with Tango Studio --- for all its claims to be pre-configured for music, no sound came from my Firewire device. The forums are in French, so I probably won't pursue this one.

(wife comes back from her silent-meditation retreat in a couple of days. Even though this doesn't make a difference to the amount of time I spend in front of the PC, I do find the whole being-alone-in-a-silent house thing conducive to this sort of work.)

 

[quad]

As an aside, I learnt something yesterday that I should probably have known twenty years ago --- that you cannot have more than 4 primary partitions on a DOS partition table. I suppose I just never tried before!

One of those things from the days when (some famous) folks thought
640kb was more RAM than anyone would ever need, which we
still live with today.

One habit I have is to put the swap partition as the first primary
partition - learnt this trick back when viruses were more
naive, there was a partition table virus which would write some junk
to the first partition.
Not sure if it matters anymore these days.

Thank god (or Linux!) for GParted

Amen to that!

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Today I have mostly been

being a nerd.

And none of it worked out at all.

Decided to download the Ubuntu 11.04 Studio variant direct (had previously added the Studio packages to 11.04. I've run out of DVDs. Got fed up with fighting with a overwriting/deleting stuff on a DVD+RW ... even though I thought I'd succeeded in writing the image (tested OK in a VM) to the disk, the install crashed.

Decided to investigate the fascinating idea of booting and installing from an on-hdd iso image, from the Grub menu. Yes, it can be done! But after a few Hey!-will-you-look-at-that! moments (after setting up the keyboard) it wants a physical CD/DVD in the actual optical drive. A day of chasing good ideas that turned out not to be. It was just like being back at work! Zero attention to the core problem!

 

[gobble]

Today I have mostly been

being a nerd.

And none of it worked out at all.

Decided to download the Ubuntu 11.04 Studio variant direct (had previously added the Studio packages to 11.04. I've run out of DVDs. Got fed up with fighting with a overwriting/deleting stuff on a DVD+RW ... even though I thought I'd succeeded in writing the image (tested OK in a VM) to the disk, the install crashed.

Decided to investigate the fascinating idea of booting and installing from an on-hdd iso image, from the Grub menu. Yes, it can be done! But after a few Hey!-will-you-look-at-that! moments (after setting up the keyboard) it wants a physical CD/DVD in the actual optical drive. A day of chasing good ideas that turned out not to be. It was just like being back at work! Zero attention to the core problem!

How about creating a bootable usb stick from the iso image?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

HTH
--G0bble

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Actually, further investigation reveals that the Studio 11.04 install fails because it is trying to apply firmware to the network adapter, apparently can't find the file it wants to apply, and then says the network adapter is down. What's that all about, eh?

ok, my network adapter does throw a hissy fit occasionally, but this is ridiculous.

I'm going back to playing Solitaire! :lol:

 

[gobble]

Actually, further investigation reveals that the Studio 11.04 install fails because it is trying to apply firmware to the network adapter, apparently can't find the file it wants to apply, and then says the network adapter is down. What's that all about, eh?

ok, my network adapter does throw a hissy fit occasionally, but this is ridiculous.

I'm going back to playing Solitaire! :lol:

Almost all mobos come with a built-in adaptor. Are you running a piece from the 90's?

--G0bble

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

No, I am running a piece from Nov. 2010

The NIC is built in.

 

[xiro]

Actually, further investigation reveals that the Studio 11.04 install fails because it is trying to apply firmware to the network adapter, apparently can't find the file it wants to apply, and then says the network adapter is down. What's that all about, eh?

ok, my network adapter does throw a hissy fit occasionally, but this is ridiculous.

I'm going back to playing Solitaire! :lol:

It it some realtek chip, can you send me your dmesg/log in private.

Regards ...

 

[frnd08]

installing ubuntu is a strange idea for creating htpc anyway.

using xmbc or mythbuntu (if u must have a -buntu repository) makes more sense.