Getting Ardour to work

I am trying to get ardour to work, I have an intel onboard sound card hda? What I get is either crackly recording or if i bump the latency up in ardour, it slows down then speeds up.

can anyone help pls, I have tried all conceivable settings of jack, so frustrating.

mick,

Yes the Tascam is full-duplex so the audio flows both ways. I don’t use Hardy, I tried it and found it to be a great OS but not nearly as stable for Audio work as Gutsy, so I went back to Gutsy.

Here’s a handy link if you don’t already know of it:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Tascam_US-122

I found in Hardy to get my US-122 up and running I had to install alsa-firmware, alsa-tools, alsa-firmware-loaders and fxload and then copy the udev script at the bottom of the ALSA Tascam US-122 page to get it working under Hardy.

If you have the line out of the US-122 plugged into your monitor amp/speakers or using the phones jack you should be able to monitor while you record.

Ooops! Sorry,

Somehow double posted, Mods please remove this post.

Hi,
There are very few chips that don’t work well with JACK, unfortunately Intel onboard HDA’s are notorious for this issue. I have one in my laptop and tried all the low latency tricks and realtime kernels etc. to no avail.

I ended up buying a used Tascam US-122 on ebay, it is well supported in Linux and works very well.

Are you using a desktop or laptop? If you are using a desktop there are many choices of soundcards that work well with Ardour, with a laptop there are fewer choices but with recent firewire support improvements they are getting better all the time.

Luckly its a desktop, how would a CREATIVE SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY 7.1 go do you think, I can get one for a reasonable, would prefer not to get a pro one atm.

just found a second hand tascam, going to give that a try, thanks. Oh, do u have trouble with latency with the tascam?

Hi,

I also just read somewhere that there is a Tascam US-122"L" that is supposedly not supported by Linux, It is not nearly as common as the good 'ole regular US-122 but should be noted,

As for latency, I run it with 512 frames per period and 3 buffers with no xruns, this achieves about 34ms of latency. In my band we use it live with QSynth for our keyboard player and there is no discernible latency, however when used with other applications i.e. a plugin host like VST host with an Amp Simulator there is a noticeable latency.

The nice thing about the US-122 is it also has direct hardware monitoring so you can select that on the unit itself and monitor your signal without latency.

Just to be clear this whole latency thing is really not that important for recording, it is more crucial if you want to listen to your input signal with signal processing in realtime.

So in short the US-122 gives me no “trouble” with latency,

On the desktop front, I think for not much more than a high end Soundblaster the ONLY choice (for a tight budget) is an M-Audio Delta 1010LT, I bought one 6 mos. ago for $190.00CDN. They sound great, 10 channels of I/O, probably one of the best Linux supported cards out there and bulletproof reliable. Of course that’s an opinion, but spending 150 bucks on a Soundblaster makes “Prosumer” cards like a Delta 66 or 1010LT look like a pretty good buy.

Just my 2 cents!

For anything other than just “playing around” I’d stay away from Creative/Soundblaster cards.
Most of them (if not all) do input resampling to 48KHz for the internal handling and then resamples it back on output.

Obviously, for any real audio work you want to avoid resampling as much as possible.

  • Peder

Quick question, does the us122 serve as a output sound card as well, I am curious about monitoring…

Do you use hardy?

Thanks

it depends on your budget. If your wealthy enough, one of RME’s PCI cards would do very nicely. I myself use the Hammerfall HDSP card connected to the RME Multiface II IO box. It is a great piece of hardware which can achieve a ridiculously low latency (~ 1ms). The specs are really good, believe me. But it’s not cheap and you need to complete it with external preamps (I have the RME Quadmic which is also a nice piece of h/w).