[Ardour-Users] Scarlett 2i2 ver 3 - audio from ardour stops, other sources have no problems

[Mark Knecht]

Hello,
   Virus induced changes in my household (mom moved in, son & girlfriend
probably coming) have made the use of my main recording area, which is
smack dab in the middle of my house and used only when the wife is at work,
now mostly unusable for anything other than mixing and listening. To this
end I wanted to set up a laptop that I can capture general guitar playing
ideas sitting on the couch in the bedroom at night. The system needn't be
perfect. It just needs to record for an hour or two in case I play
something I find interesting for a song idea later.

   NOTE: I'm a Mixbus32C user (currently 6.0.251) for the last 18 months or
so but have verified the following problems using ardour5 and am happy to
use both if needed for debug. For the sake of writing I'll use Mixbus in
the text but on this laptop the results are more or less the same with both
programs.

   The distro is Kubuntu. I've black listed all audio drivers except for
the USB audio driver. All KDE audio - system sounds, playing audio from
Chrome or other apps, all are routed to the Scarlett and work perfectly for
long periods of time.

   The overall problem is that at some point while using Mixbus audio out
of the Scarlett just stops. Mixbus continues to work - all meters are
running - but audio stops coming out of the Scarlett. Sometimes the Mixbus
error log will show an xrun, sometimes not. This can happen before I ever
roll the transport, a few second after starting, or a few to many minutes
in. It's even happened after running Mixbus for 15 minutes and stopping the
transport. Mixbus sits for 5 or 10 minutes, I restart it and have no audio.

   The same result occurs at more or less the same frequency whether I use
Jack or Alsa as the audio system.

   An interesting aspect of using Jack is that when Mixbus audio stops I
can run jack_simple_client and do get audio out of the Scarlett but even
after running that test app Mixbus doesn't produce audio.

   To get audio back I can go to the Audio/MIDI setup window in Mixbus,
stop Alsa, unplug and replug the Scarlett and start Alsa. At this point I
can go on using the program.

   I do NOT see any problems like this using the Scarlett on my big machine
although I've only done maybe 30 minutes of checking.

   Have there been other reports of this sort of failure? I haven't found
any but the ardour-user archive search doesn't seem happy right now so I
cannot tell.

   This laptop has no other defined use so I'm open to most anything to get
it working including but not limited to changing distros.

   Possibly there's a way to record the output of Mixbus's audio path - the
actual input to the USB audio driver - to see if anything is getting there?

   So, sorry for a long report. I've been at this a couple of weeks now and
have run out of ideas.

Thanks in advance,
Mark
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