[linux-audio-user] es1370 and the el cheapo myth

Hello, (sorry for the long post) I have been trying to set up the es1370 to work with my linux DAW for almost 1 year with limited success. Now there is some light at the end of the tunnel, so I thought I'd share the results as this issue has been discussed here lately and I also need some further advice. I have three Ensoniq es1370 cards in my pc. The ultimate target is to run four es1370 cards in parallel to enable an 8 channel i/o, the mythical "el cheapo multichannel DAW". I want to do this just for the sake of proving it is possible to do, and for the fun of it, never mind the availability of cheap multichannel cards. I will synch the cards by removing the crystals from three cards and connecting the clocks in chain as slaves to the first card. I currently need one PCI slot for my WLAN, therefore only 3 cards for now. However, I am not quite there yet, I only recently got the cards to work without producing "tons of xruns" on random. I am running a 2G Celeron, 377 MB RAM, ECS P4VXASD2+ mobo and the Planet CCRMA 2.4.26-ll kernel on Fedora Core 1. Here is what I did to make xruns go away: 1. Run all the optimisation hints at the planet CCRMA home page, especially the PCI latency timer optimisation did miracles to my soundcards. 2. Turn acpi off by adding acpi=off to the kernel command line in grub.conf 4. Set the BIOS not to expect acpi from the OS 5. Set BIOS to plug and play on PCI 6. Disable _everything_ from the BIOS you do not need. 7. Set Jack to use 48kHz sampling (my cards show 47040 Hz) 8. Set Jack to 64 frames per period and 7 periods per buffer Now all my cards have separate IRQs, and share IRQ only with the USB interface which in my case is a wireless mouse only. This was a big mess earlier, and I suspect the acpi and plug and play thing solved this issue. I still do not know how to enable IRQ7 for USB, which would still improve the situation. However, this is quite good as it is. # cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 695888 XT-PIC timer 1: 1552 XT-PIC keyboard 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc 9: 7894 XT-PIC ehci_hcd, ndiswrapper 10: 801578 XT-PIC usb-uhci, Ensoniq AudioPCI 11: 81 XT-PIC usb-uhci, Ensoniq AudioPCI 12: 81 XT-PIC usb-uhci, Ensoniq AudioPCI 14: 20701 XT-PIC ide0 15: 12135 XT-PIC ide1 NMI: 0 ERR: 0 # cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [AudioPCI ]: ENS1370 - Ensoniq AudioPCI Ensoniq AudioPCI ENS1370 at 0xec00, irq 10 1 [AudioPCI_1 ]: ENS1370 - Ensoniq AudioPCI Ensoniq AudioPCI ENS1370 at 0xe800, irq 11 2 [AudioPCI_2 ]: ENS1370 - Ensoniq AudioPCI Ensoniq AudioPCI ENS1370 at 0xe400, irq 12 With the settings above I get a latency of 9.33 ms and xruns only when I start new programs or shut them down. Earlier I had at least 2 xruns per minute. Now it looks a lot better, I have had the system on for several hours without a single xrun. The next step is to find out how to access more than one card at once from Jack for Audio. This I have not yet figured out, I only see one stereo alsa_pcm for the audio in qjacktl. I see three MIDI inputs but only one Audio. I can control each cards audio with alsamixer, so I know they are configured and work. Any clues how to go ahead here? br, Timo