Linux-audio-user October 2004

linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org

153 participants
223 discussions

Re: [linux-audio-user] suggestions for USB/serial/PCMCIA MIDI interfaces ?

by Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas

On Sunday 03 October 2004, Emiliano Grilli wrote: > domenica, 03 ottobre 2004 alle 08:47:38, R Parker ha scritto: > > > There is also the "midisport" line from m-audio, but > > > if I recall correctly > > > they need a firmware upload to work, so I'd avoid > > > them: > > > > I use a USB Midisport 8x8 that requires firmware but > > it works great. My purchase would be based on price > > and not whether firmware is required. > > I have no direct experience of devices that require firmware, but I recall > a thread earlier this year on the agnula-user mailing list discussing the > opportunity of distributing the firmwares, and if those firmwares were > "proprietary software" or not... Can you please give me a pointer to that thread? > As far as I can tell, agnula/demudi still doesn't distribute those > firmwares. Please let me tell you a tale about these firmware issues, and a little bit of history. A long, long time ago (January 2002), I bought a Midisport2x2 USB interface. Here is a picture of this technological terror, side by side with an Edirol friend: http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/using-rosegarden/en/chapter-2.ht… The Midisport2x2 needs to load firmware on it. Luckily, by that time there was a project conducted by Lars Dölle and aimed to build GPL firmware for this device. This project supports several devices using the EZ-USB chip: Midisport2x2, Midisport1x1, Midisport UNO and Steinberg USB-2-MIDI. The sources are on SourceForge: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/linux-hotplug/firmware/ezusb/midi/ http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/linux-hotplug/firmwarehotplug-0.1.tar.gz… This baby is distributed as a RPM package (with the name ezusbmidi) by CCRMA for RegHat/Fedora, and by Thac for Mandrake. Using this package is very easy to set up the devices. And you are using only GPL software to play your music. I don't use AGNULA, so don't ask me what happens with it. I remember that there was a browseable CVS repository long time ago with the ezusbmidi sources on it, but I can't find it now. The problem is that there are a lot of devices out there that need a firmware upload. MAudio has the 4x4, 8x8 and others. Tascam has the 122/224/428, and Steinberg has the Midex3 and Midex8. Nobody is working on a GPL firmware for them. But there is another project in SourceForge aimed to build a ripper^H^H^H^H extractor of the firmware juice from the windoze drivers that can be used on Linux: http://usb-midi-fw.sourceforge.net Using this program is very easy. You only need to copy some files from your windows driver into the directory where you unpacked the sources, and run make install on it. The firmware extracted from the windows drivers can't be redistributed without the permission of their owners. It is proprietary software. There are no sources. I wash my hands. But if you don't mind to burn your soul in the hell, it is the only way to use some USB MIDI devices on Linux. Just my 2 euro cents. Regards, Pedro

21 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] re CD Burn app

by Geoff Beasley

http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/gcdmaster/index.html that's the one ! thanks Brett

21 years, 1 month

Re: [linux-audio-user] suggestions for USB/serial/PCMCIA MIDI interfaces ?

by Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas

On Sunday 03 October 2004, Mark Knecht wrote: > <SNIP> > > > Using this program is very easy. You only need to copy some files from > > your windows driver into the directory where you unpacked the sources, > > and run make install on it. > > <SNIP> > > These files ARE the firmware... No. Not the pure firmware, and not in the format that fxload needs to upload it to the device. These files coming from the windows drivers, and needed for the midisport loader are: MidiSport 1x1: USB11LDR.SYS MidiSport 2x2: USB22LDR.SYS MidiSport 4x4: USB44LDR.SYS MidiSport 8x8: USB88LDR.SYS Keystation/Oxygen: UKS11LDR.SYS The windows SYS files are PE format files. The extractor program finds the binary firmware inside the SYS files, and converts it to the IHX (http://www.cs.net/lucid/intel.htm) text format needed by the program 'fxload' (the same program that you already use to upload the ezusbmidi firmware). You have the sources of the extractor here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/usb-midi-fw/midisport-firmware/ Regards, Pedro

21 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] Copy file from sample N to sample M ?

by Mikhail Ramendik

Hello, Perhaps it is possible, with some tool (ecasound? sox?), to take sample number N to sample number M in file1.wav, and write them into file2.wav ? My idea is to use a cdrdao toc file (created with GWC) to split a file into several files. Yours, Mikhail Ramendik

21 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] xruns - FC2/Planet(custom) vs. Gentoo(custom)

by Mark Knecht

Hi, As usual, this is a bit long as it's a difficult subject to explain completely. Sorry. Read only if you are interested in xrun problems under 2.6 kernels. I'm on a quest to get my low latency kernel situation handled better then it has been in the past. On my Planet box, which is an older 500MHz P3 box, I still run a 2.4 series kernel supplied by Fernando and it works well. On my Gentoo laptop, which in the past has been more of an email/soft-synth machine, latency didn't matter as much, but with Ardour approaching 1.0, and with jack_fst working very will with some Native Instrument VSTs, I'd like to get my Gentoo box up to world class. The hard part, however, is that the chipset in my laptop requires the use of >=2.6.3 kernels to get hard drive DMA support. The machine under test is a Compaq Presario R3070us laptop - 3GHz P4, 512MB, 80GB, ATI Radeon Mobility, CD-RW/DVD+RW with on-board ATI sound built in. It has three operating systems - Win XP Pro for remote Pro Tools recording, Gentoo Linux and FC2/PlanetCCRMA. First the good news. On my PlanetCCRMA installation, and using a custom 2.6.9 kernel that I built with significant help from Fernando, Lee Revell and Ingo Molnar, I am getting absolutely phenominal results. As a user I am running Jack using QJC with settings of 64/2, alsaplayer using realtime access playing CDs through Jack, while also running Mozilla doing GMail, gkrellm, and to top it off running glxgears and getting 1700FPS, all while getting ZERO xruns. I am able to change workspaces in fluxbox as well as drop down to the console without causing a single xrun. (This was done under fluxbox. My initial tests under KDE/Planet were not quite so good.) While this is a leading edge and fairly untested kernel, the results for the future of Linux audio kernels looks really bright. Now, unfortunately my results under Gentoo have not been so good. To make the test as fair as possible I've copied the Planet /usr/src/linux directory to my Gentoo /usr/src directory. I then saved the .config file, did a make mrproper, and then replaced the .config file back in /usr/src/linux. I did a cursory check of the config using make menuconfig and then the kernel was built and installed using the command make bzImage modules modules_install and then copyed the kernel to /boot and modified grub.conf. The kernel boots, apparently cleanly, although a few strange things happen with fonts in the boot console. I log in, do startx to get fluxbox up and going, and at this point start setting up the same sort of environment. It doesn't take long before problems show up. The following is the message screen from qjackctl. 08:10:14.157 Statistics reset. 08:10:14.275 MIDI connection graph change. 08:10:43.246 JACK is starting... 08:10:43.247 /usr/bin/jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:0 -r44100 -p64 -n2 08:10:43.252 JACK was started with PID=14453 (0x3875). cannot write to jackstart sync pipe 4 (Bad file descriptor) jackd: wait for startup process exit failed jackd 0.98.1 Copyright 2001-2003 Paul Davis and others. jackd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details loading driver .. apparent rate = 44100 creating alsa driver ... hw:0|hw:0|64|2|44100|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit control device hw:0 configuring for 44100Hz, period = 64 frames, buffer = 2 periods 08:10:45.345 Server configuration saved to "/root/.jackdrc". 08:10:45.346 Statistics reset. 08:10:45.356 Client activated. 08:10:45.357 Audio connection change. 08:10:45.359 Audio connection graph change. 08:10:57.023 Audio connection graph change. 08:10:57.216 Audio connection change. (At this point Jack is up and running under Gentoo. Everything from here on starts with I start alsaplayer) delay of 29045.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 1333.000; restart ... 08:11:03.764 XRUN callback (1). delay of 14368.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 1333.000; restart ... 08:11:04.040 XRUN callback (2). delay of 14602.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 1333.000; restart ... 08:14:13.147 XRUN callback (3). delay of 14369.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 1333.000; restart ... 08:16:38.493 XRUN callback (4). delay of 13441.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 1331.000; restart ... (At this point I stop alsaplayer.) 08:20:17.335 XRUN callback (5). **** alsa_pcm: xrun of at least 0.030 msecs 08:20:39.830 XRUN callback (6). 08:20:39.831 XRUN callback (7). 08:20:39.831 XRUN callback (8). **** alsa_pcm: xrun of at least 0.034 msecs **** alsa_pcm: xrun of at least 0.023 msecs 08:20:40.010 Audio connection graph change. **** alsa_pcm: xrun of at least 0.023 msecs 08:21:46.441 XRUN callback (9). 08:21:46.442 XRUN callback (10). Looking above there were 4 very large timing misses in Jack. Nothing like this has occurred when I run the Planet version of the same kernel. While the xruns at the end, when alsaplayer is turned off, are bothersome, I'm not overly concerned about those. That said those do not happen on my Planet version either. There are f ew, apparently unrelated, messages in dmesg about USB problems. I've tried a number of things like rebuilding Jack and rebuilding alsaplayer. They have not helped. There appeared to be far more warning messages about the kernel when I built it under Gentoo. I presume my c compiler and glibc are newer under Gentoo. Here's the info: flash root # emerge info Portage 2.0.50-r11 (default-x86-2004.0, gcc-3.3.4, glibc-2.3.3.20040420-r1, 2.6.9-rc2-mm4-VP-S7) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.9-rc2-mm4-VP-S7 i686 Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r4 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.2/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/env /usr/kde/3.3/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache sandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.tucdemonic.org/gentoo/ ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo http://mirror.gentoo.gr.jp http://www.zentek-international.com/mirrors/gentoo/" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X aalib alsa apm audiofile avi berkdb bitmap-fonts caps cdr crypt cups dvd dvdr encode esd fluidsynth foomaticdb gdbm gif gimp gimpprint gphoto2 gpm gtk gtk2 guile imlib jack jack-tmpfs java jpeg ladcca libg++ libwww mad mikmod mmx motif mozcalendar mozilla mpeg ncurses nls oggvorbis opengl oss pam pdflib perl png ppds python qt quicktime readline sdl slang spell sse ssl svga tcltk tcpd tetex truetype usb video_cards_radeon x86 xml2 xmms xprint xv zlib" So, the question at hand is why should the same kernel, built under two different distro's, but run on the same machine, produce different results. It's likely either what the compiler flags were, or what the libraries were, or what was running in the background. (So I think...) Any ideas on how I can get to the botom of this? Thanks, Mark

21 years, 1 month

Re: [linux-audio-user] xruns - FC2/Planet(custom) vs. Gentoo(custom)

by Mark Knecht

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 23:47:38 +0100, Dave <eseol(a)tiscali.co.uk> wrote: > I nearly got it right nptl but you might want to have a look at > http://jackit.sourceforge.net/docs/faq.php and how do i configure linux 2.6 > > Good luck anyway > Dave > Yes, I've seen this. The second part might certainly be part of this, however the first part isn't (yet) since under Gentoo I cannot even get it to work as root, whereas on FC2/Planet box it works as root without the realtime realtime-lsm stuff, and with realtime-lsm it works for both root and user. However, it;s a very valid point that Fernando probably did all of this for Planet users whereas I haven't done it all on my Gentoo install. Thanks for pointing that out. Cheers, Mark

21 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] GWC: selecting region between song markers?

by Mikhail Ramendik

Hello, Making a reliable and versatile ecasound script has proved too hard. So I could stick with GWC's song splitting. Its "song markers" are false sometimes but I can check this manually. I want to export each song to its own wav file, NOT to make a cdrdao TOC. GWC has a "Save selection as" feature. But I could not afind a way to select a region between the song markers! How does one do this, apart from manual placing of "conventional" markers over song markers? Yours, Mikhail Ramendik

21 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] Just bought a Delta 1010LT, now what..?

by Glenn McCord

I'm now the proud owner of a Delta 1010LT. Unfortunately getting it to run on Linux is proving a chore. So far I've googled a big (maybe I'm a useless googler), and looked at the alsa-project website So from those things I figured I would do the following... modified my /etc/modules.d/alsa file to this _____________________________________________________ # Alsa 0.9.X kernel modules' configuration file. # $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/media-sound/alsa-driver/files/alsa-modules.conf-rc,v 1.1 2002/12/21 06:31:52 agenkin Exp $ # ALSA portion alias char-major-116 snd # OSS/Free portion alias char-major-14 soundcore ## ## IMPORTANT: ## You need to customise this section for your specific sound card(s) ## and then run `update-modules' command. ## Read alsa-driver's INSTALL file in /usr/share/doc for more info. ## ## ALSA portion alias snd-card-0 snd-ice1712 # OSS/Free portion - card #1 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss # Set this to the correct number of cards. options snd cards_limit=1 _________________________________________ Run the following command #modprobe snd-ice1712;modprobe snd-pcm-oss;modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss ________________________________________ made a .asoundrc file with the following in it pcm.ice1712 { type hw card 0 } ctl.ice1712 { type hw card 0 } Simple version just so I can get some playback _______________________________________ I did the whole modules-update and restart of alsa (yes I'm using Gentoo) I get this error when I try to run aplay root@upstairs glenn # aplay -D ice1712 test.wav ALSA lib pcm.c:1972:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM ice1712 aplay: main:507: audio open error: No such file or directory _______________________________________ Basically I've just been trying to follow this http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php?company=Midiman&card=… I was using a Soundblaster Live! and wanted a 1010LT with the purpose of doing live multitrack recording with Ardour. Please tell me I can do it because that was the main purpose of buying the card in the first place. Cheers for any direction pointing. Glenn

21 years, 1 month

[linux-audio-user] CD Burn app

by Geoff Beasley

Anyone know the url for that cd front-end I saw posted a few months ago that let's you put track markers along the length of a waveform ? cheers

21 years, 1 month

RE: [linux-audio-user] xruns - FC2/Planet(custom) vs. Gentoo(custom)

by Reuben Martin

>It would be funny to end up running Gentoo but *having* to build my >kernels on a Fedora box! ;-) > >- Mark I've done quite well using jack with the default gentoo-dev-sources. An hour long ardour session recording 16 tracks at once onto one harddrive on an AthlonXP 2100 box using the kde desktop without any xruns can't be too bad. :) Part of your problem may not have so much to do with software as with hardware. The two boxes you describe sound quite different. Even though the laptop has a much faster processor, if it has poorly supported hardware it can cause all sorts of problems relating to xruns. good luck. -Reuben

21 years, 1 month

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Linux-audio-user October 2004