Are firewire and usb mutually exclusive?

I am running KXStudio on Ubuntu 12.04.

I have previously run a USB mixer (Alesis Multimix8FX) with a Midiman Anniversary Edition 4x4. I do this because I have a lot of hardware synths.

USB3 support for audio isn’t so good in linux, but a lot of firewire interfaces work well, so I got a firestudio mobile, which works fine. EXCEPT … it seems to be that support for the Midiman is tied to me using a USB 2 audio interface (the alesis mixer) because when I use the firewire interface instead the USB Midi doesn’t show up.

This isn’t ardour specific, its more of a linux audio/jack question – though of course ardour 3 is my daw on linux and the problem shows up there. (I still use ardour 2 for some things though! For some things I like ardour 2 better, particularly mastering a track.)

Hi,

Are you using a2jmidid? Perhaps I’m missing your point but Ardour won’t see any MIDI interface unless it is routed through JACK MIDI, also to my knowledge Firewire devices with MIDI ports in general don’t work with ALSA MIDI so if you are running JACK with the firewire driver it may prevent any ALSA MIDI devices including connected USB ones from appearing unless thay are bridged by a2jmidid. I don’t use KXStudio but it seems to me that a2jmidid would be automatically running as part of Cadence but that may depend on if you are using the whole KXStudio shebang or just certain packages.

On linux firewire (ffado) uses Jack midi and USB uses Alsa midi. As GMaq says using “a2jmidid -e” creates connections between Alsa and Jack midi (the -e option is to export hardware Alsa midi to Jack).

As KXStudio user you don’t need to run ‘a2jmidid’ from command line (unless you really want to), but you can just open up Cadence main window and under “Alsa MIDI” tab start “Alsa midi bridge”. That should do the trick!

Bingo! Thank you heikkiket! Now I see both my midisport midi and the firewire interfaces in Catia!