[ardour-users] Newbie defeated by OSS!

Brett McCoy idragosani at chapelperilous.net
Thu Jul 14 07:12:08 PDT 2005


Nate Monroe wrote:

> I am running a self-built system. The processor is a Athalon 64 FX-53. 
> The Mobo is a Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939 (nForce 3 chipset). The sound card 
> is the M-Audio Audiophile 192. The operating system is Suse Linux 9.3 , 
> and I am using the Gnome desktop.
> 
> As ALSA does not provide a driver for the Audiophile 192, I purchased 
> the 4Front Technologies license for the professional OSS device drivers. 
> I followed the "install" and "readme" notes. I was successful at getting 
> good clean sound out of the 192 (the OSSTEST file played crystal clear 
> and most of my system prompt sounds were present). This is as far as my 
> success went!

Doesn't ALSA support this card with the ICE1724 (envy24HT) driver?

> I did not bother with the realtime-lsm work-around for non-root 
> privileges. From the info I read on the work-around, the user is still 
> opening up holes that can be exploited by hackers.

Only if your machine is directly connected to the internet.  When I am 
doing audio work, I completely disable networking (and it also frees up 
some system resources).

> 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!

OSS and Jack don't work together.  You need to be using ALSA is you want 
to use jack.

> 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 
> segmentation problem)!

Even when starting jack as root?  Are you sure jack is the culprit?

> 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 192 will only work with #1 ICE1724 - multitrack. However, when 
> ICE1724 - multitrack is chosen, either no controls will display or only 
> one slider will apperar (synth).
> 
> Reading some more, I figured it might be that I'm starting OSS after the 
> system boots and the Gnome GUI is already up. So I go into soundconf and 
> set OSS to start at boot time. However, when I did this, Ardour will 
> only come up for a few seconds, then I get an error message stating that 
> Ardour was too slow for Jack. Ardour then shuts down and Jack stops!

Your audio subsystem isn't configured properly, quite obviously.  It 
shouldn't really matter when your sound is brought up, you should be 
able to start and stop it on the fly (loadable kernel modules).

> 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)?

Before going out and spending a lot of money, try using the ICE1724 
driver with your card.  M-Audio cards are very well supported with ALSA. 
  If the ICE1724 driver doesn't work, then I recommend getting one of 
the Delta cards which use the ICE1712 driver, which works extremely well.

-- Brett
-----------
Programmer by day, Guitarist by Night
http://www.chapelperilous.net
http://www.alhazred.com
http://www.revelmoon.com



More information about the Ardour-Users mailing list