[ardour-users] Hardware Monitoring on RME9636

[Martin Buechler]

Hi ardour-users,

I am quite happy with ardour-0.9beta28 now, and there is only one last 
thing left, that I couldn't solve since ever:
It is

	Hardware Monitoring with my RME9636 card???

lspci -v recognizes it as
-------------------------------------------------------------------
00:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: Xilinx, Inc. RME Digi9652 
(Hammerfall) (rev 08)
         Flags: bus master, stepping, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 9
         Memory at ee000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
-------------------------------------------------------------------

The wiki manual page about recording:monitoring[1] -- why isn't it 
contained in the table of contents? -- does not say anything about the 
'second category' cards and only has a dead backlink to 'JACK hardware 
monitoring' on recording:basic_recording, so I am quite lost how to 
switch on HW monitoring correctly. Googling did not really help either, 
so I am asking this question, that might have been asked thousand times 
before...

What I tried was: Changing the 'Pasthru' control in asound.state to 
'true', with the effect, that the input could be heard through the 
output directly but with heavy crackling and a pumping slightly fuzzy 
monitor sound and jack's transport also showed this out-of-sync effect.

'alsactl store' showed, that along with the 'Passthru' setting all 
'Channels Thru' changed to 'true' and also 'Sync Mode' to 'AutoSync', 
which must/could be the problem, because switching back only 'Passthru' 
to 'false' did not solve the problem. I also had to explicitely set 
'Sync Mode' back to 'Master'. Also the sense behind 'Preferred Sync 
Source' of 'ADAT1 In' isn't that obvious to me since I use AEB4-I and 
AEB4-O for analog I/O. The other settings:
IEC958 Input Connector		Internal
IEC958 Output also on ADAT1	true
ADAT1 Sync Check		true

What do I have to do to get HW monitoring working? What change in 
asound.state is needed, or even .asoundrc? How must jack be started to 
receive monitor events from ardour, i.e. punch-in/out? How must ardour 
be configured to send such events, the sessions seem not to memorize the 
'Hardware Monitoring' switch, or

Should I better buy a little external mixer and forget about the card's 
hw monitoring feature?

Thank you for assistance in advance

Martin

[2] http://ardour.org/manual/recording:monitoring