Yamaha 01V96

I have a Yamaha 01V96. I would like to get an Ardour system set up running on Gentoo Linux and use my Yamaha board as my audio interface. What would you guys recomend to input my 01V96 into Ardour? So far, it seems that the RME Hammerfal l HDSP 9652 is the best option. Are there any others out there? Is there a less costly option?

I’m looking for a sound card with two or three ADAT optical inputs and outputs so I can send at least 16 channels into Ardour (24 would be even better) and at least 8 channels out.

Also, what is the state of control surface functionality for Ardour? I’d like to be able to use my 01V96 as a control surface during mixing via the Mackie HUI Protocol.

I’m currently a Protools user, and while I’m not ready to dump my PT system completely, I’m seriously looking for alternatives.

a) the RME HDSP is the only system in production with enough ADAT i/o for your setup that also has stable linux support. it will work very well. Whether you want the HDSP 9652 or an HDSP + a digiface I/O box is up to you - there are advantages to both.

b) we do not support Mackie HUI - its a proprietary protocol that Mackie still do not seem to want to release info about and we currently don’t have anyone around with the time or interest to reverse engineer it. Ardour2 does have basic support for Mackie Control protocol surfaces - its been tested on a real MCU and a Behringer BCF2000 running in MC-emulation mode. More functionality is expected to be added next week, and it seems likely that it will make it into the official ardour 2.0 release.

However, I have a feeling that the 01V96 can also send generic MIDI CC messages, and if so, it can be used to control faders, panning, plugin parameters etc.

Hmm…I figured the RME cards would be the only viable option out there.

As for the MIDI control, I’m going to have to look into that deeper. When I use my 01V96 in Protools, I use the HUI protocol via USB cable. There is a MIDI control mode, but the manual talks about it being used for keyboards and synthesizers and such. The other options built in the 01V96 are Nuendo and Cubase SX.

Somewhere here, I know is the prefect setup that I’ve been looking for–I just have to figure it out.

Excellent, thanks for the info.

I use ardour with both an RME HDSP and and an 01v96.

I’ve got both the cardbus (for remote recording on the laptop) and PCI (in the studio machine) versions of HDSP with the digiface breakout box. My thinking was that I could switch the breakout box easily between both systems and save a little bread, but the reality is that it’s a pain to do that. Round trip (studio-location-studio) I waste about an hour swapping, and for me that’s several times a week. That’s why I’ve gotten a second digiface. As a bonus (as opposed to the HDSP 9652) I can stick the digiface away from the computer and keep my adat lightpipe runs rather short.

Last I heard, it remains to be seen if the m-audio lightbridge works with freebob, but that would be the only other likely suspect for what you need.

I normally just use the 01v96 to record on location, often in conjuntion with a live performance that I’m mixing on the same board. The direct outs work nicely for this. I’ve done 26 channels with no problem. For recording-only gigs, it’s a convenient box with poth preamps and converters in one unit. For more critical (um, better paying?) recordings, I use different, to my ears better, converters, but the yamaha’s are not bad.

As far as using it as a controller, on my system (Fedora/CCRMA), the 01v96 is automatically recognized as a MIDI interface when plugged into a USB port, and is easily patched with qjackctl. I’ve experimented minimally with assigning controllers (faders, etc) and I can verify simply that it works.

Finally, I’ve successfully used Yamaha’s Studio Manager/01v96 editor in Wine to setup the board. Very cool, although performance is a bit sluggish. A linux editor would naturally be preferable.

I hope you find this information useful.

I’m newbie.
I have Yamaha 01v.
I would like to connect it to my PC (fedora/ccrma) by usb.
Is what that functions?
which cable usb to buy? which type and to give me the name (the mark of the cable)?
if somebody can describe me how it
to do.

Hi Melkhorn,

How did you do this? I’m desperate to find the solution.
I have been trying to set this up in Ubuntu studio, it sees it as midi hardware, and the studio manager also works perfectly
but I cant make a connection from the studio manager to the 01v96. I want the manager to control the 01v96 or to program the board.

Thanks a lot in advance,

Toulcit

This thread is as dead as it could be, still I’m waking it up. Since 2007, the world has changed and the Yamaha 01V96i works with Linux as an USB audio interface for quite a while now.

However, I get some clicks from it without xruns being filed in Ardour. Thing is, I also did recordings with it that had no clicks at all. Now I’m trying to find out the right parameters. I use a ThinkPad t470 with Kubuntu/kxStudio 18.04 still. It seems to me that I either had powersave mode on or 1024 periods buffer size or even both. I think 512 might work better. I usually do the windows thing before rehearsals; so I do a system reboot.

Is there any experience of other users what might cause these clicks?

I use the console to multitrack-record rehearsals via USB, so I don’t listen to the recording right away, busy otherwise. I also have another setup with the same model of the console using 24 channel ADAT IO and RME gear, different story, quite nice. I still love the REV-X reverbs and the converters in the 01V96i.

How many Periods/Buffer?
Newer kernels are apparently better at handling 2 P/B for USB cards but your 18.04 probably has 4.15 or something similar, so if you’re currently using 2 you should try with 3 and see if that works better.

A larger buffer size should usually work better and powersave isn’t recommended while recording.

Perhaps this is an ADAT syncing problem? Can you make use of wordclock bnc?
You can also try setting the computer as the wordclock master, and the
yamaha as a slave…

Thanks for your input. Kernel is actually 5.4.0-90-generic. I could also use the lowlatency variant of it on my system but it creates more load in idle, which is not optimal for mobile laptop use. Since I’m not doing mixdown on that machine and also no software synths, it shouldn’t matter to me. Now trying 2 periods, 512 buffer and no powersave.

Can’t remember if I was in powersave mode when the issue occured but I was for sure at 1024 buffer size. It’s not always the bigger the better, I found out with some interfaces.

Note that this setup does not use any ADAT or Wordclock, it’s the USB connection directly to the 01V96i which for some settings works like a charm, for others it doesn’t.

Elderly Thinkpads had issues going on with their USB3 ports when using USB2 devices, but since they switched to all ports being USB3 in less old models such as my t470, I haven’t seen any trouble with USB as such.

So far the last recording using 2 periods, 512 buffer, kernel 5.4.0-90-generic at 48khz worked out well. However, during a longer break, Jackd froze up. I re-plugged the 01V96i’s USB connection and SIGKILLed Jack, which allowed me to restart it using Cadence. I will have to keep an eye on this thing, also I will get myself a more promising USB cable.

I have not had to deal with a bad USB cable in a while, but I think USB errors should result in some kind of dmesg logged error message, so the next time it happens it would be worthwhile to check the end of dmesg output to see if anything shows up to conclusively point to low level USB errors, as opposed to audio specific errors.

The cable I had used was exceptionally thin, so probably it did not have very much shielding. It is hard to find proper article descriptions for USB cables, so I got myself a quite expensive one with two ferrites: Amazon.de

So far, the issues did not occur again with the above-mentioned settings. Also no Jackd freezing after recording. We recorded 50 minutes straight through yesterday just fine. However in the take before I was reported an xrun which is also audible. While this is unpleasant, it’s good enough for studio use because you get to know that there was an issue could do another take if it turned out to bad. Luckily I’m not planning any live recordings with the 01V96i using Linux, I guess I wouldn’t trust it enough.