Line6 POD HD500 USB interface to Ardour

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

Hi
Has anyone had success recording from a Line6 POD via the USB interface?

After reading heaps of forums and trying the various suggestions, I’m no closer to a solution. Here’s what I know:

arecord, aplay and alsamixer show the pod as PODHD500.

alsamixer reports no capture controls, only a single PCM Playback control.

Using arecord to record something to a file, results in a very faint recording when played back.

qjackctl recognises the PODHD500. Problems start when I try to configure the HD500 as the input and the system sound card as the output. Typically, attempting to restart jack causes the system to hang. Sometimes I see a D-Bus message saying that jack could not be started. Trying to start jack from the command line gave the following amongst others:
“Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory”
“Cannot connect to server request channel”
These messages appeared after audio card 0 and 2 had been acquired.

Any clues, or just go back to using the analog input?

Thanks

#2

I don’t think Jack supports more than one soundcard at a time (i might be wrong).

Just set it up to record, and play something, and see if it registers.

My two cents.

#3

JACK can support any number of soundcards at one time. See the JACK FAQ at http://jackaudio.org/faq

#4

Thanks Paul. Just read your FAQ reference. Dumb question, when using the alsa_in alsa_out method is do you leave the input & and output devices in qjackctl set to default?

#5

yes, they should be left alone.

also, if you happened to have a current release of jack1 around, this is all much easier, and can be done entirely with JACK itself (no extra clients). most distributions don’t use jack1 by default because it doesn’t interact with PulseAudio very well, but several do make it available.

#6

Updated to ubuntu studio 14.04 recently. Qjackctl reports version 0.3.10 . Jackd -V reports 1.9.10 .

If these are the correct versions can I read how to do this entirely in jack as you suggest, in the man pages?

#7

As Ralf mentioned…

I don't think Jack supports more than one soundcard at a time (i might be wrong).
Actually this also didn't work on my system when I ran UbuntuStudio; but it does work when I use KXStudio 12.04 or (even better) TangoStudio (http://tangostudio.tuxfamily.org/en/ts-debian).

Michael

#8

I had no success with alsa_in / out. They reported that jack was not running when ps shows it was, and afterwards ps shows two jackd process.

I’ll put this in the too hard basket for now.

Thanks for all the suggestions

#9

Not sure if it’s not too late, but this commit fixes audio playback and recording on POD HD500:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?id=cc18b2f4f3f1d7ed3125ac1840794f9feab0325c

Likely you don’t want to patch and compile linux kernel yourself, so poke maintainers of your distro to backport it to distro kernel.