ALSA sees USB sound card, Ardour does not

Installation & Configuration Linux
#21

Next try:

  • Open qjackctl's "Connect" window and load the picture to Google photos
  • On the left under "Readable clients / Output ports" you should find something like "capture_1" under "system"
  • Open a terminal window, speak into the microphone and run "jack_rec -f test.wav -d 10 system:capture_1" (replacing "system:capture_1" with the likely information from the "Connections" window)
  • Open "test.wav" with Audacity (or another audioplayer) and see whether something was recorded.
  • If this is ok, Jack is working correctly...
#22

Thank you. qjackctl’s “Connect” window uploaded to https://goo.gl/photos/Gp9iSRasdpJRyBjA9

For the test recordings, I did it twice, once for system_1 and once for system_2 because the device is a single channel device and unknown what capture channel it drives, if not both. So:

jack@jack-Aspire-one ~/Ardour $ jack_rec -f test.wav -d 10 system:capture_1 disk thread finished jack@jack-Aspire-one ~/Ardour $ jack_rec -f test2.wav -d 10 system:capture_2 disk thread finished jack@jack-Aspire-one ~/Ardour $ ls patch1.xml Screenshot at 2016-11-10 09:20:08.png temp6 patchbay.png Screenshot at 2016-11-10 11:44:51.png test2.wav qjackctl setup.png Screenshot at 2016-11-12 14:57:09.png test.wav

And we have two .wav files.

Both files open in Ardour and both contain audio, and by tapping the laptop and then the external sound card mic, I confirmed that JACK was recording from the USB device. So, as you say, JACK is running. Thank you for helping me test that. Next stop: getting the audio to Ardour.

When I open Ardour and arm a track, I can tell by tapping the mics that it is using the laptop’s internal mic, so we need to point Ardour at what JACK is listening to.

Right-clicking on the armed track, here is the Input: https://goo.gl/photos/9y1oiRkt9SM5NiYG7

#23

A side issue, I see jackdbus chewing up a lot of cpu cycles. htop here: https://goo.gl/photos/PyCRTUouU8SL9VTv7

I pressed the “stop” button in qjackctl but it hung at “Stopping,” had to sudo killall jackdbus to kill JACK, and cpu cycles dropped to normal.

I don’t want this to hijack this thread which is about getting Ardour to hear the external USB sound card, so I’m only posting this as a reminder of something to look into later.

#24

You are clearly still not telling JACK to use the correct device. If you do not tell it to use hw:CODEC then it will not do so. You need to do that in the setup window of QJackctl (if you’re using QJackctl).

#25

Thank you. Please see the Settings window screencaps on Google that I have posted links to, perhaps I am overlooking something.

#26

There is no screencap of the setup dialog of QJackctl or a listing that shows how JACK was actually started.

#27

This is the Setup screen shot that I posted: https://goo.gl/photos/tpydggYsfCv5y1iW9

Please advise if there is another window I am overlooking.

#28

Please run the following command in a Terminal window once you think you have JACK running and correctly configured:

ps aux | grep jackd

and paste the output here.

Also, note that it is frequently orders of magnitude faster to try to get solutions to problems like this on IRC (see the Support tab above), where people can interact with you in real time. I’m often there daytime in the UTC timezone, and there are other people around spanning most of the European/Americas daytime+evening.

#29

Thank you. I’ll see about joining the IRC channel. In the meantime, don’t the tests that Arnd had me do, using jack-rec, tell us that JACK is running and seeing the device?

Here’s the result of your suggested test:
jack@jack-Aspire-one ~ $ ps aux | grep jackd
jack 8277 0.0 0.0 4692 1924 pts/5 S+ 08:14 0:00 grep --colour=auto jackd

#30

That output says that JACK is not running. Please confirm by running the complete command suggested by me several posts earlier:

cd /tmp && wget http://jackaudio.org/downloads/adevices.sh && bash ./adevices.sh