[LAU] ffado streaming mode

Pieter Palmers pieterp at joow.be
Thu Sep 25 05:59:59 EDT 2008


porl sheean wrote:
> a while ago i purchased a focusrite saffire pro 26io. it has finally
> come to a point where it is quite reliably useful as an interface for
> jack/ardour (the latency isn't brilliant, but i'm pretty sure that is
> the fault of my firewire chipset).
I fixed latency for ffado yesterday, and at least one person reports 
3x32 as working for him. So if you have a good firewire chipset, you 
will also be able to achieve this. But maybe wait for beta7.

> 
> i found out recently that unfortunately, in order to get teh device
> working as a basic 'summing mixer' for live work (i wanted to
> essentially use it as a basic 8 in 1 out preamp to send to a small
> desk at a venue) it needs to be set in 'streaming mode'. i can get
> this working by starting jack and just leaving that running, but i was
> wondering if anyone knew of an easier way (maybe one of ffado's
> command line utilities? there seem to be a lot in there and i don't
> know what half of them do). if not, would it be difficult to write a
> small app that basically just 'turns on streaming'? or should i just
> keep using jack? (i am hesitant to do this as i have still had a few
> issues with dropouts, and as you can imagine at a live performance
> this could be a problem).

The fact that streaming has to be turned on is a design decision of 
Focusrite. We can't change that.

I don't see why you wouldn't use jack. What's the point in using a 
separate application that basically does the same? Just run jack with a 
large period size, and you should be fine. Something along the lines of:

jackd -R -d firewire -p2048 -n4

should work fine. I've done multi-hour recordings with the pro26 at 
3x1024 without any problem whatsoever.

Greets,

Pieter

PS: Most of the command line tools in the ffado repository are test or 
debug tools.



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