[ardour-users] Newbie defeated by OSS!

[Steve D]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 12:20:43AM -0600, Nate Monroe wrote:
> 
> As ALSA does not provide a driver for the Audiophile 192, I purchased
> the 4Front Technologies license for the professional OSS device
> drivers. [...]


ALSA *does* support the ice1724 chipset in your soundcard:

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php?module=ice1724

I have an M-Audio Delta 1010 (ice1712 chipset) and it works perfectly
with ALSA, Jack, and the AGNULA DeMuDi Linux distribution:

http://demudi.agnula.org/

I'm not sure if it matters, but I would be worried myself if I tried to
use *both* OSS and ALSA at the same time. I have no idea what the
interactions are--maybe none, maybe a lot. There is probably no need for
OSS in your case, if the ice1724 is anything like the ice1712 (which are
also known as envy24 chipsets).

> 
> I did not bother with the realtime-lsm work-around for non-root
> privileges. 

Realtime-LSM is installed by default by the DeMuDi distribution, and it
works very well.

> From the info I read on the work-around, the user is still opening up
> holes that can be exploited by hackers.

If you come from a Microsoft Windows background, it's understandable if
you have that level of caution or paranoia about such things. But in
Linux such security risks are greatly subdued and rare. You might do
some more research, but you may not need to worry too much about the
"exploited by hackers" thing-- ;-) Others may give you more specific
information about this subject.

> So, logging in as root, I went
> to "/usr/lib/oss/bin/", execute the command "./soundon", then pull up
> QJackCTL and hit <START>. Jack starts. However, when I pull up Ardour
> I am unable to set any connections using the QJackCTL interface
> <Connect> or <Patchbay>interface (I'm assuming this must be done to
> enable Ardour to work with the Audiophile 192 ports). It is as if I
> had no sound card!

Maybe OSS has taken control of your sound system, locking out everything
else?

> 
> Side Note: For what ever reason, starting Jack also somehow corrupts
> the .mozilla directory where my Firefox profile resides. This results
> in my not being able to open up Firefox at all. I have to delete the
> entire .mozilla directory and build a new one (error message tells me
> I have a segmentationproblem)!

That sounds very strange. I use Jack and Mozilla Firefox all the time
and have never had that problem.

> 
> The sound mixer in use is Aumix. When ALSA is running I can see four
> choices under Aumix, <File>, <Change Device>: 0: Realtek ALC850 rev 0
> (OSS Mixer) 1: ICE1724 - multitrack (OSS Mixer) 2: Nvidia CK8S (Alsa
> Mixer) 3: ICEnsemble ICE1724 (Alsa Mixer)

The ICE1724 is probably your M-Audio soundcard. Instead of trying to
research the 'net for ALSA's support for your specific model of M-Audio
soundcard, you might want to "google" for "alsa ice1724"


> [...] 
> Messages I read from
> ardour-users-ardour.org<http://ardour-users-ardour.org>so far, are
> from people using ALSA. Is OSS a bad choice for working with Ardour?
> Should I get rid of the 192 and get an RME Hammerfield (my research
> says this card IS ALSA compatible)?


--you mean one of the RME HammerFall series? They are well liked in the
Linux Community, but I wouldn't abandon your M-Audio card yet. They are
well like in the Linux community as well. I personally get very high
sound quality and complete ease of use from my M-Audio Delta 1010, and a
lot of people use the Delta 1010LT or other M-Audio cards with Jack and
ALSA.

One thing that you DO want to get is the Envy24Control software that
provides a very nice graphical interface to control the M-Audio's
hardware mixer as well as its other features (sampling rate, bit depth,
etc.) Envy24Control is included in ALSA's alsa-tools package, or in
DeMuDi (which is based on Debian Linux), it is included in the
alsa-tools-gui package, installable using the program synaptic (which is
every bit as nice as SuSE's YaST software installer).

Best wishes,

Steve D
New Mexico US
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