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darkice
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 98
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 Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 4:24 am Post subject: Creative X-Fi Surround Pro 5.1: how to make it work |
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hello there, i'm struggling to find a way to make this external usb sound card work.
A fellow user suggested trying jack but actually this made things even worst since qjackctl fails in starting jackd and before now i never used jack, except through pipewire.
I'm trying from a laptop, i had pipewire managing everything but after that suggestion I uninstalled it and now i'm relying on pulseaudio + jack2, since the main idea was using jack to drive the x-fi only when i need to listen music or movies through it.
I'm completely lost, that's why after a lot of time i decided to write back in this forum.
I hope someone can help, this audio card isn't young anymore, i don't care about the knob or the remote (even if it would be a dream to make those work too), anyway it's weird it's still so unsupported.
thanks for your attention and support
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fedeliallalinea
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Joined: 08 Mar 2003
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| Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 6:15 am Post subject: |
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Moved from Gamers & Players to Kernel & Hardware.
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Questions are guaranteed in life; Answers aren't. |
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darkice
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 98
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| Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 11:41 am Post subject: |
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thnx, i've found a similar post in the same section, that's why i posted there. sorry for the mistake
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darkice
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 98
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| Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 11:59 am Post subject: |
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ok, update
i tried pulseaudio without pipewire, casually, and it's working simply by selecting from pavucontrol the configuration (5.0 in my situation). maybe recompiling a lot of stuff helped.
However, I would like to have a discussion on how it is correct to configure these sound cards, in situations with multiple sound cards (such as integrated + external, as in my case), for further times and more users.
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darkice
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 98
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| Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2022 9:41 am Post subject: |
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ok, as far as now, i don't know if i'll be able to see pipewire managing everything as before, so right now i'll try to keep this setup with pulseaudio and jack2, the latter still doesn't seem to start and work properly but maybe it will be easier once i'll understand why and let those 2 coexist ... jack will be needed for audio recording, so i'll try to keep it.
if anyone wants to add something, he's welcome
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Progman3K
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Joined: 03 Jan 2004
Posts: 773
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2023 8:15 pm Post subject: |
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Hi darkice!
Don't know if you've resolved the problems you've had with jack or not, but because I have a somewhat similar problem, I thought I'd post what I've discovered:
The computer I am using has (like yours) multiple soundcards, and had a similar problem of never being able to start jackd.
Keep in mind, I am no expert, so my hypotheses may be wrong
Using cat /proc/asound/cards, I get the following ouput
| Code: | 0 [VirMIDI ]: VirMIDI - VirMIDI
Virtual MIDI Card 1
1 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
HDA Intel PCH at 0x4204220000 irq 171
2 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0x83080000 irq 17
3 [M4 ]: USB-Audio - M4
MOTU M4 at usb-0000:00:14.0-1, high speed
4 [Wireless ]: USB-Audio - SteelSeries Arctis 1 Wireless
SteelSeries SteelSeries Arctis 1 Wireless at usb-0000:00:14.0-3.7.3, full speed |
Invoking jackd with minimal parameters, specifically trying to specify which driver to use (in my case ALSA) it would error out like this
jackd -d alsa
| Code: | [...]
Acquire audio card Audio0
creating alsa driver ... hw:0|hw:0|1024|2|48000|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
ALSA: Cannot open PCM device alsa_pcm for playback. Falling back to capture-only mode
Released audio card Audio0
audio_reservation_finish
Cannot initialize driver
JackServer::Open failed with -1
Failed to open server |
I figured (by seeing the Audio0 mentioned in the log) that maybe jackd was trying the very first soundcard it was finding. In this case, that meant the virtual MIDI card, which itself doesn't have audio-capture/audio-playback capabilities.
So instead, I invoked jackd like this:
jackd -d alsa -d hw:3
| Code: | [...]
Acquire audio card Audio3
creating alsa driver ... hw:3|hw:3|1024|2|48000|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
configuring for 48000Hz, period = 1024 frames (21.3 ms), buffer = 2 periods
ALSA: final selected sample format for capture: 32bit integer little-endian
ALSA: use 2 periods for capture
ALSA: final selected sample format for playback: 32bit integer little-endian
ALSA: use 2 periods for playback |
Lo and behold, audio became available in the software I was trying to run
So possibly in your case, you might try invoking jackd with parameters similarly-suited to your system.
Hope this helps
PS - The stage I am at presently is trying to figure out what the proper gentoo way of persisting the jackd parameters is.
In other words, where to save the settings so the get picked up automatically when a software requests jack.
For example, I am using Rosegarden and Reaper, which will start jackd (by dbus, I think?) automatically when they are run.
But I can't figure out where the jackd settings should reside. Obviously they are being read from somewhere, but they are incorrect.
If I start jackd manually, as shown above, then whichever software that needs it will start, detect jack is already running and use the already-started instance with no problem. |
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Kernel & Hardware
