Compatible Audio Interface?

Did I say genius? Sorry, I meant “genius”. And by thanks for that, I meant “thanks” for THAT.

Ahh ok, that makes much more sense and I feel much better.

   Seablade

I have the older Focusrite Saffire Pro 10io… and just upgraded to an A&H Zed R16, not worried about the firewire thing as James pointed out above… I have a T.I based PCIe controller and a VIA one… To my surprise the VIA one was actually more stable (contrary to popular opinion)… I picked them both up on eBay for next to nothing. As I already had ffado installed (with all devices enabled as per default), I didn’t have to do any kind of driver installation when I changed the devices over…
I’d highly recommend a firewire device that is supported by ffado… (although check on the mailing list as the website is not up to date with supported devices… e.g. the A&H Zed R16 is not listed, but is definitely working well)…

Things are starting to become a little clearer … however I am having quite a time finding a laptop/interface combo that will work. Firewire seems to offer a lot more options for compatible interfaces, but I can’t find a sufficiently powerful ubuntu compatible laptop that has a firewire socket. I am basing “sufficiently powerful” on the assumptions that I will need a 7200 rpm hard drive and at least a 2 GHz processor … if this is overkill, I would be very pleased to hear it as it would open my options somewhat. As far as USB goes, the Presonus 1818VSL seems to get mentioned a lot with regard to Ubuntu, but ALSA themselves don’t list it at all. Does anyone know about this?

I’m grateful for this opensource DAW and other great software running on linux.

My setup:
M-Audio Delta 1010:
04:02.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. ICE1712 [Envy24] PCI Multi-Channel I/O Controller (rev 02)

Miditech Midiface 4x4 USB midi interface:
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1acc:1a0b

Running on a intel quadcore gigabyte-mainboard PC on Debian GNU/Linux "jessie"with rt patched kernel.
Linux vision-linux 3.14.12.04-rt9 #4 SMP PREEMPT RT Mon Aug 18 21:29:33 CEST 2014 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I use Korg Wavestation EX, Korg N364, M-Audio Venom (midi ports, no usb driver available on linux), Korg Wavedrum - and a Yamaha 5 string fretless bass.
I have used zynaddsubfx, rakarrack and just installed Ardour3 … great!

I hope to learn, and give back what i can. Thanks to everybody who made this possible.

kind regards
Jens Peter Nielsen
Denmark

@suddentwigs

I copied my post from Linuxmusicians about this…

*Note these are my own experiences with the Presonus 1818VSL on a few different machines

  • The latency performance is quite poor (ie 1024fpp+) unless you use an RT Kernel
  • These units will occasionally just stop streaming audio with JACK, not often… but enough to be annoying
  • The headphone output doesn’t work unless you manually route the Audio to outputs 7/8 with Qjackctl or Patchage
  • Many new computers with USB-3 have very poor audio performance with USB-2 Audio devices in general including the VSL
  • The VSL1818 seems to be quite sensitive to USB chipsets in general, for example the VSL works OK for me on an older laptop, however my son has a slightly newer laptop (not with USB-3) and the VSL is too flaky to even use at all and we are using the same kernel/OS, I would say he has a USB hardware problem but he uses a Scarlett 2i2 with absolutely no issues at all…
  • There is no hardware direct monitoring so you have to manually connect your inputs to the outputs in a JACK patchbay to fake hardware monitoring

I can’t say it works flawlessly but it works decently… most of the time… occasionally :slight_smile: