The linux DAW thread

[LBN]

Working on dyne:bolic at the moment.
Got it up and running - now just trying to find the necessary software to add - namely WineASIO.

Regards
Caleb

http://download.linuxaudio.org/jacklab/ ... 1.i586.rpm

[Caleb]

Thanks for those links.
Actually I'm pretty quick - I've already ditched Dyne:bolic and moved on. Terrible I know.

I guess that must seem pretty pathetic to Linux guys, but I was having trouble how to work out dpkg/dselect and rpm so I thought I'd go for another distro to see if I could find one that was at least a little lean and also have a decent package manager.

I'm now using PCLinuxOS - MiniMe distribution. I won't say I'm in love - but so far I've been much more comfortable about using it than the others. Thanks glokraw for the suggestion.

There's still quite a bit I don't understand about how these distributions work because I'm installing packages and then running out of memory quickly trying to run Qjackctl of all things. Then I lose all my installations on next reboot. I wish I had more time to read up on all these things so that I know what the hell I'm doing. Now I understand why distros like 64Studio and JAD are made for people like me.

In any case - in my session I was able to install Jack, WineASIO and installed XT2 for Windows and a couple of VSTis for testing purposes. The applications/plug-ins seemed to work well. However, unfortunately I'm having a rather rudimentary problem that so far no distribution I've used has recognised my Roland/Edirol UA-101

For some reason I was thinking that Edirol devices would be recognised "out of the box". Not sure how I got that impression. Don't suppose anyone has had experience troubleshooting for this kind of thing?

Something I haven't been able to check out yet - I wonder if anyone has tried this. REX2 files in Linux using Wine?

I'm really hoping that I'm going to be able to use REX2 files in Linux as I have quite a selection. I may have other options like translating them to XT2 clips or REAPER "parts", but I'd rather just keep using the REX files if possible.

The journey continues....

Regards
Caleb

[glokraw]

Thanks for those links.
Actually I'm pretty quick
Caleb

Edirol UA-101 in qjackctl, some other guy said
"if you open Jack Setup, go to Interface and click the arrow pointing *to the right* (NOT the black one pointing downward) you will get a list of all available sound cards by name. In Gutsy, the UA-101 should now appear. After you select it, you need to click the *right-pointing* arrows for Input Device and Output Device and select the UA-101. (BTW, After you do this, the Interface menu will gray out. If you need to get back into it again, you have to reset the Input/Output Device to "default")
'Gutsy' is just a Ubuntu nickname, the edirol support is in the kernel.

If you are running MiniMe as a live cd, your modifications will indeed vanish, until you install on some re-writable media, like usb-stick or hardisk. A 4gig usb-stick would be plenty. The pclinuxos installer is a gui that is very well done, (and easily resizes ntfs partitions.) Being quick, you'll have an easy time of it!

On a 4 gig usb, 1.5 gig for minime root partition , mountpoint = /
2 gig for a /home partition mountpoint = /home
the rest for swap, which will show as its own type of partition in the gui
Choose ext3 for the filesytem on / and /home
Once you are in the installer, the above will begin to make sense
Cheers

[Caleb]

Yeah - I was reading that somewhere today. I'll have a look. I would have thought it should come up in the ALSA setup utility - but it doesn't.

I have found out since then that there was a new ALSA driver at some stage that included compatibility for UA-101. I'll check to see if I have that version of the driver or higher.

Not being able to use that device is the first showstopper. Once I've got past that - not getting decent performance will be the next. Hopefully both of those will be covered off and I'll be swimming forward.

I have started the initial process of trying to install on USB stick. I will try to follow your advice there. I will also attempt to create a boot floppy or something.

Although there are some things that don't excite me about PCLinuxOS, I have to say it's been much less painful than any of the others for me to get up and running. I actually managed to install and run XT2 with WineASIO. Never got that far with any of the other distros.

I believe there is also a project underway to add the realtime kernal meaning I might not even need to look at another distro.

Regards
Caleb

[Caleb]

OK - got the USB stick installation done and I've created a boot floppy successfully

I have found out that REX2 files will work fine with REAPER running under WineASIO. Was having difficulty with XT2 however with some complaints about a wrong version of the rex library or something. Will have to look into that one.

I'm still having absolutely no luck with the Roland UA-101. The system itself detects it as hardware - but not as a sound device. It doesn't come up via those Jack > buttons that you mentioned.

As this is still experimental for me and I can always start an installation again now that I know what I'm doing, I'm installing the latest version of the kernal I can find and see if there is any difference.

It's always something that gets in the way - always something. *sigh*

Regards
Caleb

[glokraw]

OK - got the USB stick installation done and I've created a boot floppy successfully

Caleb

I felt the axis tilt further down under!

kernel-rt26.24.4.tex3.rt is available in pclinuxos synaptic, the testing category of your selected
repository should be added. the line at the bottom of the repositories panel in synaptic
should read
main extra non-free kde testing

It will be grayed out until you click on the repository that has its selection box ticked.
You will need the kernel-rt-devel package also, its next in the list. They will be installed in addition to your current kernel, appearing as a choice in the main boot window.


Edit the text file /etc/security/limits.conf put this at the end of the file,

@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - nice -19
@audio - memlock 1200000
# End of file

The @audio points to a linux group called audio. It must exist, and caleb must belong to that group, so to set that up, the
system -->configuration -->configure your computer --> system -->add remove change users of the system. This panel is where you add or remove users and groups to your system. I
don't think it is well done, but choose a group or user, choose the action --> add group, or action --> edit menu, and select the specific one to edit. You'll see. You must belong the this audio group and edit that text file above, in order to use the rt-kernel as a normal user, the preferred way. But the root user can start and run everything, no changes needed, (no mix-n-match allowed) but if root is to use wine, root must run these same 3 commands that a normal user would, to enable access to a normal installed wine:

wineprefixcreate
regsvr32 wineasio.dll
winecfg (this is a simple preferences panel for 'windows' ala wine

This would set up a separate .wine folder in /root.

Change the memlock figure above to equal around 70% of your memory. I have seen values for
'nice'
like 5, 10, -10 not sure about those details

Cheers

[glokraw]

It's always something that gets in the way - always something. *sigh*

Regards
Caleb

The aquisition of knowledge will defeat the lack of it.

Have you tried starting the linux with the edirol unplugged, then plug it in after the system is fully running, and check again in qjackctl?

Also a wubi installed ubuntu studio 8.04 may have different kernel/modules, to deal with the edirol, and
the rt things should be active by default, main difference between ubuntu and other distros is that root commands are done like this:
sudo name-of-root-command
vs
su (enter) type root password (enter) type the name-of-root-command
Cheers

[Caleb]

Hey - not sure if this means anything, but if I go to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist I have an entry for snd-usb-audio.

I'm guessing this is actually the issue - the device is being blacklisted for some reason.

To be cute, I edited this to remove the entry - but that didn't help. I also tried to muscle in the device into the sound file in the same directory. That definitely didn't work.

Thing is that the version of ALSA I'm running was after a driver for this USB device was developed and released. I have 1.0.15 and it came in 1.0.14. I have switched off the Hi-speed functionality already as I don't have USB2.0 on this PC. This was something also mentioned in that Ubuntu forum thread.

I'm now trying again to upgrade my kernel. I did so in my floppy-booting USB drive installation and I was never getting the option to boot a different kernel which I thought was supposed to happen.

I'm having a rather frustrating time installing a new kernel now - maybe a server load thing - but my downloads keep failing with server timeouts. The one thing I can say is that at least I can just try it again and the downloads don't start from 0% again. That's actually VERY handy.

I hope I can get past this issue as it's kinda a showstopper for me going ahead with Linux. If the audio interface cost $100 then I'd probably just ditch it and get another one, but it was 10 times that price when I bought it. I don't know if I can justify turfing it because I can't get it working in Linux when it "just works" in Windows. We'll see though. I hardly know what I'm doing so there may be some enormously obvious thing I should be doing that will address everything.

Regards
Caleb

EDIT: Finally got the new kernel installed and rebooted with the newer kernel. Still nothing.

[glokraw]

Regards
Caleb

EDIT: Finally got the new kernel installed and rebooted with the newer kernel. Still nothing.

Excellent! Being an IT pro, and a quick study, are qualities I wish I had!
Now, for updated audio, install and/or update these:

aoss
libalsa2 (its at 1.0.18, a bit newer and shinier)
libalsa-data
libalsa-oss
alsaconf
alsa-utils
alsa-plugins
jackit
qjackctl
lash
liblash2
qsampler (for giga file playback)
There will be some dependancies also, so bear with the downloads.
You can switch repositories if the one you have ticked in synaptic keeps failing on some file, just make sure only one is used at a time. And a click the 'reload' button must be done.

Once updated, and with the blacklist snd-usb-audio line commented out, and the edirol unplugged, reboot,
and as root, enter the command lsmod
this lists all the loaded kernel modules. (Interesting to read of all the sound modules)
Run the command modprobe snd-usb-audio
There should be no feedback, as I recall
run the command lsmod again
Now, the (formerly blacklisted) kernel module snd-usb-audio should be loaded.
Now plug in the edirol, and check if it is recognized in qjackctl. If not,
reboot with the edirol plugged in, and check again.

edit, I forgot if I suggested killing any motherboard soundchip in the bios,
or removing any pci soundcard, or turning off plug-n-play in the bios...these could help a lot in some cases!

Cheers

[Caleb]

Lots of cool things to try out there.
I will go through the painful process.

I started having problems with Jack until I realised that some earlier advice you gave me was necessary to get Jack running when not using root. I thought I was going mad.

I even got out of having to great a new "group" because my audio user is actually called "audio". I read somewhere that the @audio can be a specific user as well.

There's a part of me that loves doing this stuff - I support and manage operations of large software solutions as part of my living and I do enjoy the fact finding, analysis, decision-making, solving and the managing of that whole cycle. It gives me tremendous satisfaction when ideas that I've had lead to a better solution for my customers.

However, sometimes I just need things to work straight-away. Although I would expect some work involved in the systems I support, I would not expect to waste any time support Microsoft Word (for example).

As a greater personal project, I'm learning more about supporting Linux systems and I do expect that to be an interesting journey filled with problem solving. But for my studio I need it to just work - reliably and with high performance.

Let me just mention a small experience I had with XT2 on Linux that might be a worthwhile demonstration of what I mean.

I wanted to set up XT2, so I downloaded the application and set it up in an appropriate directory structure. Easy and very Windows-like so far. Then I run it - oooops doesn't work, what can be the problem?

I hunt around a little and find that XT2 will not work with Jack unless I compile my own version of the .so file XT2 uses. Thankfully a very specific reference of the command I need was given on the XT2 website. So I run it and - oooops I don't have the g++ command.

Now luckily I know exactly what's happened here, PCLinuxOS MiniMe distribution is cut-down and probably doesn't come included with a C++ compiler. So I find the appropriate product which isn't actually called g++, it's called gcc-c++ and I install it via Synaptic. No issues there.

OK - I run the command again and I get a page full of errors.

Now I don't know where I learned to be this cluey but I already had a feeling I knew what the problem was. I looked at the errors and it couldn't find alsa or jack header files. So I thought - what's probably happened is that I have only the runtime versions of alsa and jack and to compile anything I will need special development libraries.

So I go hunting in Synaptic and I think I've hunted down what I need and download/install it.

I run my compilation and voila - all done without error.

Now I'm pretty lucky in that I have done some C development before (albeit personal projects and I was pretty shit at it), so I found that I could kinda guess what was wrong and take a stab at addressing it. But someone who just wanted to set up XT2 to work with without any particular IT background could well have resorted to mass murder to try and get the application up and running.

Now OK - sometimes this kind of thing happens with applications, but the reason I brought this up is that I wanted to compare it with the process to install in Windows.

I downloaded the executable, I double-clicked on it, told the installer where I wanted to install and once the installation was finished double-clicked on the shortcut and could start working straight away.

Now in my "I would like to learn more about Linux" journey none of this would have phased me, but in my "I want to now set up my studio software so that I can get working in Linux" quest, this was very annoying.

Anyway - I'll start wrestling through all of those ideas you've given me and see if I can get a working USB audio interface by the end of it.

Thanks for your help.

Regards
Caleb

[Caleb]

OK - I tried all the steps there and I still wasn't able to get anything out of my USB device.

One thing I noticed while in the BIOS settings was that I had hi-speed USB enabled. I don't have hi-speed USB available and so I disabled that thinking maybe that was what was causing some sort of conflict - but that didn't work either.

I'm now doing a massive - upgrade every package that's available to upgrade - exercise in case there's some stray thing somewhere that's causing the issue.

Then I'll reboot and go through some of these steps again to see if I have any luck.

I'm liking PCLinuxOS - just not liking this problem.

Regards
Caleb

[glokraw]

snip

I'm liking PCLinuxOS - just not liking this problem.

Regards
Caleb

99% of what you're learning will apply to the other linux distros. Ubuntu Studio 8.04
uses synaptic for package management, and if the guy with the working edirol setup was using that distro, it might be good luck to give it a shot since the wubi installer works as advertised. Hurray for the weekend, and pots of strong coffee

[Caleb]

I kinda got my Roland UA-101 to work. I ended up doing it through BIOS configuration rather than Linux settings.

I set it to enable hi-speed and set it to hi-speed and then set the hardware device itself to hi-speed.

It doesn't look like it's working properly because I get a red light on the device rather than a green, but I did actually get sound out of it.

Unfortunately, then everything else went wrong - couldn't get any Windows software to recognise WineASIO drivers. Blah blah blah.

So I think what I'll do is try to install multiple different distros on my USB harddrive (which actually has space)

I'll go through each of them in turn and see what I can get out of them all:

PCLinuxOS (full install rather than MiniMe)
64Studio
JAD
Ubuntu Studio
Puppy (for a very lean distro)

If I assign about 8-10 Gig for each distro that should be enough.

I have one (hopefully simple) question though.
If I set up multiple Linux partitions per distro, what is the ideal set up for that sort of thing given I want to allocate a maximum of 10Gig per distro.

Usually there's one partition for root, one partition for home and one for swap. Do you have any advice on what the proportions should be?

Regards
Caleb

[glokraw]

I kinda got my Roland UA-101 to work. I ended up doing it through BIOS configuration rather than Linux settings.

I set it to enable hi-speed and set it to hi-speed and then set the hardware device itself to hi-speed.

It doesn't look like it's working properly because I get a red light on the device rather than a green, but I did actually get sound out of it.

Unfortunately, then everything else went wrong - couldn't get any Windows software to recognise WineASIO drivers. Blah blah blah.

So I think what I'll do is try to install multiple different distros on my USB harddrive (which actually has space)

I'll go through each of them in turn and see what I can get out of them all:

PCLinuxOS (full install rather than MiniMe)
64Studio
JAD
Ubuntu Studio
Puppy (for a very lean distro)

If I assign about 8-10 Gig for each distro that should be enough.

I have one (hopefully simple) question though.
If I set up multiple Linux partitions per distro, what is the ideal set up for that sort of thing given I want to allocate a maximum of 10Gig per distro.

Usually there's one partition for root, one partition for home and one for swap. Do you have any advice on what the proportions should be?

Regards
Caleb

4gig for root, double the ram total for swap, and the rest for /home should be safe,
The full pclinuxos install runs a bit over 2gig for root, the audio distros probably less,
since they lack Open Office, and lots of unrelated apps, which I remove from pclinuxos at
each reinstall, regaining some 700 megs in the root partition.

I've seen directions and articles in google searches for doing this, and sharing the /home partition among several distros, here's a link for one:


http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-493776.html

but I'm fairly sure
you'd progress faster doing a focussed test with each distro, since your focus is getting sharper every day, and your hardware is at least on the map now. Did you reinstall wine, and all your key windows apps after your bios mods? Did you try zynaddsubfx linux softsynth using its virtual keyboard? Does qjackctl now show connections to your edirol?
Cheers

[glokraw]

Another thing, in the pclinuxos Configure Your Computer -->Hardware-->Look at and configure hardware panel,
there is an entry at the bottom for unknown/others, may need to scroll down to see it, and some motherboard usb chipsets show up there, and you can press the config button. Maybe the edirol will show up there too.

Alsaconf is a script to run to help setup your sound system, it is available in synaptic repository
Cheers