The Underscore Archives

This is kind of a cross post from BBLUG but I thought it might be of 
interest to some parties on this list, also.
Big love and New Yearz greetz,
Ray x

Guys and girls,

 Just thought I'd update any interested parties with my audio exploits.
Finally plumped for the Firewire PCMCIA card option after reading about
freebob (freebob.sourceforge.net). Freebob is a driver for the D1000
chipset which powers a lot of Firewire based pro audio cards. The card I
finally plumped for (tried the M-Audio Audiophile first but that totally
refused to work and just sat there flashing angrily) is the 10-in,
10-out Edirol FA101.
 After several days of struggling, I have finally managed to get the
damned thing working and it sounds great! I found this blog post to be
very helpful... took me 90% of the way:
http://parumi.wordpress.com/tag/ubuntu/
 The final 10% took 90% of my time. I discovered that my soundcard
(raw1394 over PCMCIA) does not like to be ACPI managed and although the
driver will load, discovers the ports and appears to be loaded and
functioning, nothing plays on the card and I could find no documentation
as to why this may be. It seems that as soon as you turn off APCI PCI
power management, it starts working like a charm. (I have an IBM R40 and
as such, it comes with IBM's own BIOS so this problem may even be
restricted to this make or even model, I just don't know). I don't know
why this may be (read something vague and hand-wavy about IRQ routing)
but frankly, if it works now I really don't care...
 The distribution I settled on is Ubuntu Feisty, which I have found to
be very well put together and fast. Feisty has the advantages of being
super up-to-date (for an alpha it's surprisingly unbuggy) and therefore
has very good multimedia support. The other obvious choices were FC6
(always been a redhat boy but I really think I could change, now. FC6
wasn't as slick as I was hoping and not as nice as Ubuntu) and Planet
CCRMA (although this is more out of date as their latest distro is based
on FC5).
 Hope this helps anyone considering a Linux pro audio set-up. See you
down the front :)

Rx

Raymond Brooks wrote:
 > Hallooo...
 >  I know some of you lot do audio stuff and was wondering if I could
 > ask for some advice. I'm after an external sound card for my laptop
 > and have been looking into the various options available to me. The
 > laptop has USB 2 but no IEE1394. As far as I can tell, my options are
 > as follows:
 >
 > 1. Buy a USB 2 sound card
 > 2. Buy a PCMCIA IEE1394 adapter and a Firewire soundcard
 >
 > Ideally, I would like as many analogue I/O ports as possible. I've
 > looked at various M Audio cards (Audiophile & 410) and the Edirol UA101.
 >> From my research, the M Audio boxes look good but as I have no
 > experience with FireWire on Linux I'm slightly wary of spending the
 > cash then finding the devices won't talk. From what I've read, the
 > UA101 will not work at all due to Edirol choosing a proprietary USB
 > audio implementation, which sucks as I quite like their things. Has
 > anyone used M Audio kit under Linux? Are there any other devices
 > bblugsters would recommend? All wisdom forthcoming re: PCMCIA FireWire
 > would also be very helpful.
 >
 > Thanks all,
 >
 > Ray
 >