On Sun, 29 Mar 2015, Ben Bell wrote:
Well here's the promised follow-up mail. So far, the bottom line is that it's not as reliable as my dual Delta 1010 setup. There's a lot to like about the Focusrite but things are not entirely working properly and I haven't got to the bottom of why.
There is a lot to be said for something that shares internal bus and power supply.
Secondly, the ffado drivers may or may not be solid under the hood when they're up and running (assuming the above bug isn't their fault) but on the version I'm on (2.2.1) there's a lot of shakiness around the edges. ffado-mixer is very slow to use, taking a second or so to process each command sent to the ffado-dbus-server.
Pulse uses the dbus IF to control it's mixer and the levels seem to track with fader movement very well I can notice no delay. This is not a dbus issue I think.
Various things like stopping jack also cause a whole bunch of processes just to lock up and I have to go around manually killing manually killing ffado-dbus-server, ffado-mixer, jackd and qjackctl.
My first thought is: why would you stop jack? I know here, it starts on session login and only stops at logout (which around here means starts at boot and stop at shutdown) Are you using jackd or jackdbus? If you are using jackdbus, you may wish to try chmod -x jackd to keep it from being auto started by some jack client. Jack_control will allow you to change any of jack's parameters while jackdbus is running... though the only one that makes sense is latency which can be changed on the fly anyway.
Anyway, if you are using qjackctl to turn jack off and on then I would suggest using it's run script on start/stop to shut these other things down before jack and start them again after. Again, I have set qjackctl not to start or stop jackdbus so I can use the connection window for connections. I can use it to stop jack, but no matter the AI, stopping jack means restarting pretty much all the SW and reconnecting all the ports. There are some APPs that will allow a reconnect to jack when it comes back and will reconnect at least it's own ports to whatever they were connected to before but that to me is not a good way to run things.
If I switch the Focusrite off then, again, I have clean up work to do before things are usable again.
I am sure if you powered the d1010 down while the system was running you would have similar problems or worse. Don't do that. I think if you want your focusrite to be as stable as an internal card you need to treat it the same... powered before the system starts and off after system. Using an AoIP or USB IF should be the same.
Just my 2c -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
