Questions: ALSA and Ardour

  • zendrum
Posted: Wed, 12/16/2009 - 21:24
I have a few questions about ALSA and Ardour. I am using 64Studio 3.0 Beta 3. I searched long and hard through these forums and elsewhere online, so if the answers are readily available, my apologies - just point me in the right direction. 1. Default ALSA output when JACK is not in use: Obviously, when JACK is running, you can pipe any audio source to any output on your card. I occasionally do stuff with this PC when JACK is NOT running, and I would like the default system audio out to be the SPDIF jack on my card. The system is an M-Audio Delta 1010 (NOT the LT version). I tried the following to set up iec958 as the default system out- alsamixer - there was no option to switch spdif on envy24control - there is no spdif "on" option that I could find outside of the monitor mixer, which isn't what I mean to use. editing /etc/asound.state - the 64Studio ALSA setup seems a bit "different" from a normal ALSA setup - this file has a bunch of rows of 0's and 1's that made no sense. What I ended up doing was creating a /etc/asound.conf file with the following line in it: pcm.!default iec958:M1010 This seems to work for me. Is it the proper way to do this? Jack does take over when invoked and stop this functionality, as desired. What are the 0's and 1's in the iec958 lines of the /etc/asound.state file? And, when you type aplay -L, why are all of the devices in my setup enumerated as 0? 2. I'd like to use the latest version of JACK2, which is 1.9.4, to get SMP functionality. Are there instructions somewhere for building on 64Studio 3.0 B3? Or are the instructions on the JACK site OK? Or is there a package available for 64Studio 3.0 B3 of JACK2 1.9.4? 3. Same with Ardour 2.8.4 - Are there instructions somewhere for building on 64Studio 3.0 B3? Or are the Ardour build instructions the way to go here also? Or is there a package available for 64Studio 3.0 B3 of Ardour 2.8.4? Many thanks, and happy holidays to everyone! zendrum
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Envy24Control

  • porisija
  • 09/29/07
  • Fri, 12/18/2009 - 20:56
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I didn't find any pointers to the mixer program Envy24control which is installed by default in 64Studio. Have you tried it? It's an excellent mixer - a part of "alsatools" package at alsa website downloads - which is specifically designed to use the capabilities of envy1724/ice1712 based soundcards like your M-Audio Delta 1010. It should work with or without Jack. The only use for using Ardour without Jack is to my experience recording network audio streams. Why? Because Jack is a low latency "plug" layer that uses Alsa drivers as its backend. However, I have done that kind of recording with Audacious ( a XMMS media player clone ) through Jack to Ardour. For the adventurous I recommend the excellent Ecasound command line DAW, which has a steep learning curve but offers a lot of use on low-spec machines - also network ready in daemon mode.

Hello Porisija: Thank you

  • zendrum
  • 07/31/09
  • Sat, 12/19/2009 - 00:12
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Hello Porisija: Thank you for your reply. I did try envy24control. None of the controls in that program worked for me to set SPDIF as the default output when JACK wasn't running. Editting the above file was the only way I found to make it work. Also, I got Ardour 2.8.4 to compile and install! I am geeked! This was my first try but I got there eventually, and learned a lot. I'm going to mic up and record my DW's over the next few days, and I'll post some files to see what people think of my drum sound. (A very happy) zendrum

Sound

  • Quentin Harley
  • 05/24/07
  • Thu, 12/17/2009 - 21:43
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Hi zendrum, If it works for you, it is the right way to do it. Regarding Jack, the version shipped with 3beta1 is already a Jack2 1.9.x version. Ardour 2.9.4 still needs to be packaged, but I cannot check at the moment. Cheers, Quentin Harley

Thanks!

  • zendrum
  • 07/31/09
  • Fri, 12/18/2009 - 13:37
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Hello Quentin: Thanks for your reply! I know what you mean about "if it works". I just always like to make sure there isn't a better way. Sorry about the Jack version! Major brain fart on my part, I don't how I missed that one. I am working on building Ardour - learning a lot along the way. I got all the dependencies sorted. The last error I need to figure out is adding the versioning, and I hope to figure that one out tonight. Basically, all of my above questions are answered, I've almost figured out building Ardour from source, and I appreciate your help! Eric