[LAU] Edirol FA/UA-101 and Linux, experiences?

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Fri May 11 12:55:52 EDT 2007


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On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 10:46:09AM -0400, Hector Centeno wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm looking for a 8-channel audio interface for a laptop and I was
> considering the ones made by Edirol. Does anyone have any good
> experience using any of these interfaces? I can see that the UA-101
> has been recently supported by the 2.6.21 kernel but there seem to be
> some issues with the playback sync:
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=d0b0fac14edf81dc62615cd757e7c73d2059152c
> 
> What about the FA-101? Is it stable? How low is the latency?
> 

I have an FA-66 and it sounds and works great. I think the FA-101 has very similar electronics, just more inputs and outputs. 

I can get down to "-p 128 -n 3" with jackd 0.102, running the 2.6.21 kernel with RT patches, rtirq script, and FreeBob 1.0.3.  The "-n 3" is a requirement, but the "-p" might be able to go to a lower value on faster hardware. Recent music distros (Musix, 64studio, CCRMA) would probably have everything you need to work out of the box.

The issues you'd have aren't with the FA-101, but rather with FireWire. Definitely make sure that the FireWire chip or card in your PC is on its own interrupt, or at very least isn't sharing one with too many other things (cat /proc/interrupts, and look for "ohci1394").  Also, some Ricoh chips have been reported to not work well, others have been reported to work just fine. "lspci" will tell you what you've got. However, I've never seen a list of which specific Ricoh chip models are good and which aren't.

There's this too:
http://freebob.sourceforge.net/index.php/List_of_Working_Setups

The FreeBoB mailing list and its archives have been very helpful too.

- -ken
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