Hi, i’m a beginner user of ardour. I’m used to route my M-Audio FastTrackUltra signals with Cubase/Windows and I can’t find out why the hardware inputs remain linked to the hardware outputs though I muted all channels in alsamixer and disconnected all in jack. Please, I can’t find anywhere how to solve this awful problem, does someone can help me?
@pterodattero, I have got M-Audio FTU-8R. It works perfectly with GNU/Linux - with exception of SPDIF-in. This link with in-out has nothing to do with Ardour or Jack. The card has an internal mixer and some DSP effects, well supported in GNU/Linux (a sort of miracle…). So when you open alsamixer you have to mute all connections in “Capture” department (alsamixer -> F4). All possible connections (and effects) in alsamixer will be shown if you pres F5 key (some 140 or so faders…). Actually if you only want to listen to a recording through main output (1,2) or headphone 1, you need to turn on just two faders: [Playback] 1/1 and 2/2. This internal routing is quite complicated. I suggest you use qasmixer instead of alsamixer. As Paul suggested you may try using ALSA backend, but it didn’t work for me so far (maybe something has changed in the meantime), but Jack backend seems to work perfectly, so we are covered.
@paul, in my experience this particular device M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R doesn’t connect to Ardour via ALSA backend. It fails with following message: “[ERROR]: AlsaAudioBackend: failed to allocate parameters.” .Otherwise it is recognized by the system, works with Jack as expected, in fact I find its drivers to be more stable with Linux than with Windows (older versions at least). It even has internal mixer which is fully functional and accessible by alsamixer. I recommend this card to Linux users.
There’s no reason to be using JACK unless you actually need it. Ardour is quite happy to run on the “native” audio system on Linux, Windows and macOS. It’s also normally simpler for users, particularly first time users.