Kai, thanks for the reply.
I have a few more questions.
--- Kai Vehmanen <kvehmanen(a)eca.cx> wrote:
Hello,
On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Stephen Cameron wrote:
[...]
ecasound -c -r -b:128 -a:1,2 -i jack -o drums.wav
-a:3,4 -i jack -o guitar.wav
This will work, but some notes:
- you don't need to give "-r" (automatic if sufficient privileges) or
"-b:128" (learned from jackd)
- the routing is somewhat wrong, as chains 1-4 (defined with -a) are
by default all stereo, so you for instance end up routing audio from
"-i jack" (two channels) to two stereo chains (2x2 channels) which
are again mixed back to "drums.wav" (again two channel)
This confuses me. In qjackctl's connections screen, I see 18 capture
channels on the RME. My impression is that these are mono, not stereo.
I need to capture 4 of those channels, two for drums, two for guitar.
When I start ecasound like this:
ecasound -c -r -b:128 -a:1,2 -i jack -o drums.wav
-a:3,4 -i jack -o guitar.wav
Then ecasound has 4 inputs that I can connect the 4 capture channels to.
Maybe it is the "-i jack" listed twice that makes 4 input channels on
ecasound? Previously I had tried something like:
ecasound -c -r -a:1,2,3,4 -i jack -a:1,2 -o guitar.wav
-a:3,4 drums.wav
and that didn't work, I got two input channels on ecasound, and well,
that wasn't what I needed, so I was kind of thrashing around a bit
trying to discover just what all the options really do. (I did read
the man page, it's how I've gotten as far as I have, but it's rather
succinct. :-)
What you probably wanted is (mono track for drums and guitar)
Actually, I need stereo for drums and stereo for guitar, and
generally I'll be wanting to transfer up to 4 stereo tracks
at once, or any combo of stereo and mono totalling up to 8
captured channels (I have just 1 ADAT connection from the
AW4416, so, 8 mono channels.)
sh> ecasound -c -f:32,1,44100 -a:drums -i jack -o
drums.wav -a:guitar -i jack -o guitar.wav
I'll give that a try later tonight. I'm confused as above you
say "-i jack" gives a stereo chain, but you also say above
"(mono track for drums and guitar)" Perhaps you meant "stereo"
rather than "mono"? Or am I misunderstanding something still?
Yeah, I had found those. An example of recording multiple channels
from JACK would would have helped me a lot. (Well, maybe it's asking
too much to hope someone would anticipate exactly what I want to do
and provide an example. ;-)
If you want to play with JACK and ecasound, try also
ecasignalview:
ecasignalview jack_alsa null
ecasignalview jack null
ecasignalview jack_alsa foo.wav
ecasignalview -f:32,12,44100 jack_alsa jack_alsa
Ok, thanks. I didn't know about that. Especially helful because
I have no audible output from my RME, it's just connected to the
AW4416 and nothing else. To hear what I've transferred, I have to
restart JACK to use my audigy2. Being able to see some feed back
during the transfer would help a lot.
... and do use also other tools (like
'timemachine') to make sure the
problem is not in a bad installation/bug in ecasound.
Oooh, timemachine looks interesting. Thanks.
This works, but it seems small sections of the
audio are
being dropped here and there, so the result is that the
transferred data is mostly correct, but is kind of "jumpy"
as it skips these apparently dropped sections, which are
short, but definitely noticeable. I suppose it could be
some issue with my OS, scheduling, etc., or possibly
cable problems. That latter I can rule out by moving
my computer, and using different, shorter cables, I guess.
My first guess this is trouble with the JACK settings (too low latency
settings for your current system and how it is configured). I'd recommend
trying witCh slightly larger settings of jackd period size and retry
the tests. Simply connect your soundcard inputs back to its outputs with
qjackctl and verify that the audio is ok (make sure any analog loopbacks
are disabled -> you don't hear any audio from the outputs until you
connected them with qjackctl).
Some tips on how to debug/trace JACK performance can be found for
instance at:
-
http://jackaudio.org/faq
-
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/installtwosix.html#SECTION00…
--
links, my public keys, etc at
http://eca.cx/kv
Thanks for the tips, this gives me a lot of things to try.
-- steve
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