[LAU] OT: external sound for linux card advice

[Jeremy Jongepier]

On 09/04/2010 12:44 PM, Lorenzo wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm sure this has been discussed many times, so sorry for
>> re-iterating... but I guess new drivers and products come out each
>> day, so here you go:
>>
>> I'm looking at external audio cards (for use with my laptop)
>> especially to do multichannel (balanced!) output
>>
>> - Obviusly they should work with linux-jack (ubuntu if there are any
>> issues with this distro)
>> - at least 8 balanced outputs
>>
> Well,
> It seems that this topic is much less interesting than the mysteries of
> the subconscious :)
>
> Anyway I may have found a bargain for a Focusrite Saffire PRO 24
> http://www.focusrite.com/products/saffire/saffire_pro_24/
> Although the ffado site lists support as experimental
> (http://www.ffado.org/?q=node/1204) the posts there and other stuff
> about the pro 10 which I guess is similar make me optimistic about it
> working.
>
> Again it would be nice to hear some current news from someone
> successfully using it
>

Hello Lorenzo,

The Saffire Pro 24 differs a lot from the Pro 10 IO. The 24 uses the 
DICE chipset and only ffado 2.0.0 from svn trunk supports it. So you 
have to either build it yourself or if you use Ubuntu 10.04 you can grab 
working drivers from my PPA: 
http://ppa.launchpad.net/autostatic/ffado/ubuntu/pool/main/libf/libffado/ (mixer 
doesn't work though). FFADO 2.0.1 (the latest stable release) has no 
support for DICE chipsets afaik. That release is mainly to provide 
support for the new Juju FireWire stack.
I own a Saffire Pro 10 IO myself and I can really recommend it, it just 
works so well with Linux and the audio quality is pretty decent. At work 
I recently hooked up a Saffire Pro 40 (the 24's big brother) to an 
Ubuntu 10.04 machine, that's why I uploaded the FFADO stuff to my PPA, 
and so far it performs very well but I haven't tested it thoroughly yet.

Best,

Jeremy