RME HDSP 9652 and playback on another card?

Hello all.

I’m the happy new owner of a RME HDSP 9652 that, together with a linux peecee, I figured would replace my trusty old Silicon Graphics Octane. The Octane has been great and really quite simple enough for transferring audio DATs to the computer, but unfortunately the lack of decent multitrack software has left the ADAT interface in it largely useless, and I don’t get the impression anybody’s interested in porting either JACK or Ardour to IRIX. :slight_smile: (And it weighs 35 kg and sounds like a jet plane too.)

I’ve got CentOS 5 supplemented by Planet CCRMA in this box and all seems to be well in the software department.

I can get JACK going in a rudimentary way that at least allows me to record stuff through the RME in Ardour, but monitoring while recording is a bit of a problem since the only obvious way to do it is feeding the RME ins to the RME outs, the RME doesn’t have any analog outs, and while I could, I suppose, connect the Ardour outputs to a pair of channels on one of the ADAT connectors on the RME and connect that to an eight channel A/D / D/A box I have, and from there to a mixer and eventually on to headphones, it would just seem slightly more straightforward to use the on-board soundcard in the PC for monitoring. Am I totally off base here?

Took out some more hardware and routed the monitor outs through the 8 channel AD/DA box so I don’t have to use the on-board sound at all.

Is there a GUI application for the routing matrix at present? I don’t see an obvious way of doing this outside Ardour, but of course within Ardour it seems to be doable. I don’t seem to get zero latency monitoring however, there is a noticeable delay of a few ms from the input (a mic connected to one of the 8 channels) to the output (channels 7 and 8 of the AD/DA feeding a mixer -> headphones). jackd is running with -H -m.

Here’s the secret (at least for two channel monitoring)

jackd -R -d alsa -d hw:1 -H -M -m -C hw:1 -P hw:0

hw:1 is the RME, hw:0 is the internal soundcard.

Got it going now!

…and yes, I have seen the part of the FAQ where it says not to do this. :slight_smile:

Need to figure out where I want the monitoring to go, I suppose.

I use qjackctl if I want to, for example use tapiir and jackrack with a guitar for some home grown Frippertronics, no ardour required.
qjackctl’s graphical jack patch management and jack startup options are handy when I do that kind of thing. Could be what you are after.

Website: http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net

qjackctl is included in Planet CCRMA but I just hadn’t gotten there yet. Thanks for the hint, I’ve got it now. Reading the JACK startup output a little more carefully I think I also now see why I was getting poor latency (JACK’s default startup options indicate a period of 1024 frames, which equals about 40 ms, changed that to 64 frames which is about 3 ms)

For zero latency monitoring, you have to use the hardware matrix mixing capabilities of the card. Take a look at hdspmixer. I think it is part of alsa-tools (not sure).

Thanks Matthijs - yes, indeed, I need to have the HDSP route signals here and there “live” instead of listening to them via Ardour. Too many moving parts…