[LAU] 64studio, FFADO, no luck

[Ken Restivo]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 07:47:47PM +0100, Pieter Palmers wrote:
> Ken Restivo wrote:
>> Well I decided to try again to bring my 64-bit Intel Micro-ITX board
>> alive, running 64studio and Ardour, to use as an alternate DAW
>> machine at a friend's studio. I gave up trying to make a headless
>> softsynth out of it, because it wouldn't boot off of a USB flash
>> drive. Now that I have the Atom-based EEE, that's working out rather
>> well as a portable softsynth, so I'm trying to find another use for
>> the Micro-ITX since it's been sitting around unused for many mohths.
>>
>> The studio has two Digidesign Firewire audio interfaces there, one
>> with 4 inputs and one with 8. I'd ultimately like to have them both
>> running, sync'ed up, for 12 tracks of audio.
>>
>> Problem is, 64studio 2.1 seems to have an ancient version of FreeBoB
>> (no FFADO) and an even more ancient version of JACKD (0.103.0, the
>> same one I've been running for two years now on my laptop).
>>
>> Just for grins, I tried to hook up the Digi Firewire box, but jackd
>> said "Root node has no children!" over and over again, then
>> SIGSEGV'ed. Oh well. gscanbus showed the firewire interface just
>> fine, and the binary package of FreeBoB doesn't seem to include the
>> "test-freebob" script and tools.
>>
>> I dunno. Should I go with Sid? Or do any of the other Debian-derived
>> audio distros support FFADO right now?
>
> AFAIK FFADO won't help you with digidesign gear.
>
>>
>> I was hoping to show off how easily a 1.6Ghz 64-bit machine could
>> record 12 tracks of audio with low latency using Linux. Alas, the
>> knock-yer-socks-off Linux demo might have to wait a while.
>
> It will have to wait until someone convinces digidesign that FFADO is  
> something they want to help.
>

Um, what? Digi gear isn't supported at all on Linux??! Auugh.

I guess they view it as hardware copy-protection for their software (what's the full version of ProTools go for nowadays? US$4000 a copy? Sheesh.).

OK well that throws a monkey wrench into my plan to convert the studio from Mac/ProTools to Linux/Ardour. Damn.

Hmm, a FOAF used to work as a QA engineer at Digi.  Maybe he still does, I'll check.

-ken