[linux-audio-user] Looking for soundcard.

[Sylvain Reynal]

On Sunday 18 December 2005 18:19, lilli chiffon wrote:
> Thanks for your answers.
>
> OK I forget firewire device.

Thought you'd be glad to know that I've got an Edirol FA-66 that works 
flawlessly with freebob prealpha 3.0 and jack. Both audio I/O and MIDI ports 
work ok, very stable when used with ardour, rosegarden, RTsynth and stuff, so 
that "prealpha" sounds a bit of a misnomer to me; this might as well be a 
decision from the developers to avoid too much grumbling ;-). 

Latency perf: I measured a latency of 11ms (with no xrun except a handful of 
on start-up) after:
1) increasing the PCI bus latency of the ieee1394 OHCI controller to 243 (see 
"Tuning the hardware"  at http://www.soundfabrik.net/wb/#linux), and
2) recompiling a vanilla 2.6.11 kernel with the PREEMPT flag turned on. No 
more, no less...
(my current setup is a Clevo-5400 laptop with a 2.4Ghz P4).
I also tried a 2.6.14 kernel with Ingo's low-latency patches and 
the PREEMPT_RT flag turned on. This did not drastically improve the situation 
(slightly lower latency, but the system would freeze now and often), as IMHO 
the ultimate bottleneck seems to lie in the kernel's ieee1394 subsystem.

That said, if a ~10ms latency suits your needs (it does for me), then you may 
safely buy this card and use it with freebob. Note, however, that 
there is no alsa support as yet in freebob, but you can use jack <-> alsa 
bridges (e.g., oss2jack or jacklaunch) to make alsa/oss-only applications 
work with jack.

Hope this helps.

Syd


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Sylvain Reynal
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