Edirol FA-66

Message

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Sat Oct 18, 2008 6:48 pm

Hello,

I've recently purchased an Edirol FA-66 and am trying to decide just how I should go about setting it up for my specific application.

I'm at a bit of a loss as ALSA doesn't appear to officially support the device, yet people seem to be getting this thing to work--however the documentation remains unclear.

I'd need the basic functions of playback and the ability to share the device with audio applications running simultaneously (Renoise, Ardour, Rosegarden, Audacity, etc.) in a manner that will allow complete interconnectivity--I've read that this can be accomplished with jack and ffado in some configuration.

So, I ask, where might I start? Can anyone reflect on a similar situation?

Regards.

poly_poly-man · Post by **poly_poly-man** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 12:43 pm

pm aidy - he's done it before.

look up JACK to get started

aidy · Post by **aidy** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:31 pm

You can't make firewire audio devices work with pure alsa, you need to use jack and route alsa audio to jack.

So what you need is this:
the FFADO drivers for JACK
the jack plugin for alsa
an .asoundrc; here's mine:

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
	type plug
	slave { pcm "jack" }
}

pcm.jack {
	type jack
	playback_ports {
		0 "system:playback_1"
		1 "system:playback_2"
	}
	capture_ports {
		0 "system:capture_1"
		1 "system:capture_2"
	}
}

Flash audio somehow doesn't work with the jack plugin, so what I did is connect the on-board audio to my FA-66's 3+4 inputs - which is a stupid hack but gets the job done. (I actually don't have an .asoundrc on my normal user, I just set up every program to use jack: mpd, mplayer, vlc, ...)

EDIT: you'll also need a realtime kernel if you want to use JACK reasonably well. Read http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Jack (currently down, and might be a bit outdated too)

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:41 am

Sorry for the delay, but I haven't had much time to play with gentoo; midterms.

Apparently, the FFADO drivers aren't in portage and I'm also not quite sure how to setup ALSA when their documentation is written for people using PCI sound cards.

I was really hoping that gentoo-wiki.com would be back to normal by now as I'm a bit more lost than I might have admitted in the original post.

UPDATE:

Making use of the steps shown here, I've now compiled and installed the FFADO drivers from source.

shickapooka800 · Post by **shickapooka800** » Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:10 am

as for the realtime kernel, I would use layman to pull the pro-audio overlay and then emerge rt-sources. go hear: http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/inde ... =Main_Page and follow the instructions for configuring rt-sources. also you can remerge pam, which should pull it from the overlay instead of normal portage, and the ebuild will give you a working /etc/security/limits.conf to start with for realtime audio.
I would recommend grabbing the latest rt-sources that the overlay offers. if you end up with something pre 2.6.23 (or around there) you will run into some issues with other drivers (possibly nvidia).
All I know is that the default rt-sources is a 2.6.18 kernel, which is not a terribly good idea if you are trying to use other, more up to date kernel modules.

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Sat Oct 25, 2008 7:33 pm

This is spit out every time I try to use "qjackctl":

Code: Select all

14:27:21.876 Patchbay deactivated.
14:27:21.881 Statistics reset.
14:27:21.883 Could not open ALSA sequencer as a client. ALSA MIDI patchbay will be not available.
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory
14:27:38.383 Startup script...
14:27:38.383 artsshell -q terminate
sh: artsshell: command not found
14:27:38.784 Startup script terminated with exit status=32512.
14:27:38.784 JACK is starting...
14:27:38.784 /usr/bin/jackd -R -dfirewire -r48000 -p1024 -n3
14:27:38.786 JACK was started with PID=11985.
jackd: unknown driver 'firewire'
14:27:38.788 JACK was stopped with exit status=1.
14:27:38.788 Post-shutdown script...
14:27:38.788 killall jackd
jackd: no process killed
14:27:39.190 Post-shutdown script terminated with exit status=256.
14:27:40.812 Could not connect to JACK server as client. - Overall operation failed. - Unable to connect to server. Please check the messages window for more info.

I'm currently trying to figure out why the firewire (FFADO) drivers aren't being found.

What should I make of the ALSA errors near the top?

aidy · Post by **aidy** » Sat Oct 25, 2008 8:16 pm

ignore the alsa errors, they don't matter much
don't know exactly what do to about the firewire driver error
you did follow this right? http://subversion.ffado.org/wiki/Instal ... FromSource

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Fri Oct 31, 2008 12:24 am

I'm currently on the "Compile and install FFADO" page.

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scons DEBUG=yes

Leaves me with:

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scons: Reading SConscript files ...
Checking for a working C-compiler (cached) yes
Checking for a working C++-compiler (cached) yes
Checking for pkg-config (at least version 0.0.0)... (cached) yes
Checking for C header file expat.h... (cached) yes
Checking for XML_ExpatVersion() in C library expat... (cached) yes
Checking for libraw1394 (1.3.0 or higher)...    (cached) yes
Checking for libavc1394 (0.5.3 or higher)...    (cached) yes
Checking for libxml++-2.6 (2.13.0 or higher)...         (cached) yes
Checking for dbus-1 (1.0 or higher)...  (cached) yes
Checking for libiec61883 (1.1.0 or higher)...   (cached) yes
Checking for lrint(3.2) in C library m... (cached) yes
Checking for lrintf(3.2) in C library m... (cached) yes
Checking whether 'which pyuic' executes (cached) yes
Checking for the python module 'dbus' (cached) no
Checking whether 'which pyuic4' executes (cached) yes
Checking for the python module 'dbus' (cached) no

        I couldn't find all the prerequisites ('pyuic' / 'pyuic4' and the python-modules 'dbus' and
        'qt', the packages could be named like dbus-python and PyQt) to build the mixer.
        Therefor the mixer won't get installed.
        
Checking for alsa (1.0.0 or higher)...  (cached) yes
 ALSA found, building ALSA plugin.
Trying to find the system triple: (cached) i686-pc-linux-gnu
Doing a DEBUG build
Detected DIST_TARGET = i686
Doing a 32-bit build
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
scons: `src' is up to date.
scons: `support' is up to date.
scons: `tests' is up to date.
scons: done building targets.

I thought that the middle error was negligible at first, but now I can't help but wonder if the jackd ./configure output isn't somehow related.

Code: Select all

jack-audio-connection-kit 0.115.1 :

| Build with ALSA support............................... : true
| Build with old FireWire (FreeBob) support............. : false
| Build with new FireWire (FFADO) support............... : false
| Build with OSS support................................ : true
| Build with Sun audio support.......................... : false
| Build with CoreAudio support.......................... : false
| Build with PortAudio support.......................... : false
| Build with NetJack support............................ : false
| Compiler optimization flags........................... : -DREENTRANT -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -funroll-loops -march=i686 -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse
| Compiler full flags................................... : -I$(top_srcdir)/config -I$(top_srcdir) -I$(top_srcdir) -D_REENTRANT -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS -Wall -g -O2
| Install dir for libjack + backends.................... : ${exec_prefix}/lib/jack
|
| Default driver backend................................ : "alsa"
| Shared memory interface............................... : "System V"
| IPC Temporary directory............................... : /dev/shm
| Install prefix........................................ : /usr/local
| Default tmp dir....................................... : /dev/shm

Apparently, jack can't locate libffado while slocate reveals:

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/usr/local/lib/libffado.so
/usr/local/include/libffado
/usr/local/include/libffado/ffado.h

Is that not for what it would be looking? Does this boil down to correctly pointing to the FFADO installation?

aidy · Post by **aidy** » Fri Oct 31, 2008 2:35 pm

what happens if you explicitly enable ffado when doing ./configure? (see ./configure --help)

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Sat Nov 01, 2008 1:49 am

Doesn't appear to have altered anything.

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jack-audio-connection-kit 0.115.1 :

| Build with ALSA support............................... : true
| Build with old FireWire (FreeBob) support............. : false
| Build with new FireWire (FFADO) support............... : false
| Build with OSS support................................ : true
| Build with Sun audio support.......................... : false
| Build with CoreAudio support.......................... : false
| Build with PortAudio support.......................... : false
| Build with NetJack support............................ : false
| Compiler optimization flags........................... : -DREENTRANT -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -funroll-loops -march=i686 -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse
| Compiler full flags................................... : -I$(top_srcdir)/config -I$(top_srcdir) -I$(top_srcdir) -D_REENTRANT -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS -Wall -g -O2
| Install dir for libjack + backends.................... : ${exec_prefix}/lib/jack
|
| Default driver backend................................ : "alsa"
| Shared memory interface............................... : "System V"
| IPC Temporary directory............................... : /dev/shm
| Install prefix........................................ : /usr/local
| Default tmp dir....................................... : /dev/shm

aidy · Post by **aidy** » Sat Nov 01, 2008 1:56 pm

okay and what happens if you install libffado to /usr instead of /usr/local?

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 2:48 am

Alright, that worked. Jack now starts with ffado support.

Glad to to finally see some progress with my time so limited.

Now what?

Dementia · Post by **Dementia** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 7:52 pm

I now have decent playback capabilities; I can probably attribute what bit of noise there is to unbalanced, Radioshack TRS cables.

And yes, flash doesn't appear to work with jack so far as I can tell. Did you find that it wasn't possible or that it'd be too difficult?

Thanks aidy.

Regards,
Dementia

aidy · Post by **aidy** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 8:54 pm

afaik it's simply not possible... they did something pretty wierd with their alsa calls I guess

there are some idiots that route alsa to pulseaudio and then pulseaudio to jack to make their flash work