LinuxMusicians

@ thorgal, could you take a look at: http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php ... =543#p2122 ?

Hello guys,

Ok, I finally got a chance to muck about with Envy24Control.

Initial appearance: THIS IS what I am looking for. The interface looks great. It recognized my card right away and there really wasn't much I had to do with set up. However, there are a few caveats.

The first page of settings dealt with input channel volumes (Monitor Inputs)...however, at this point I was concerned with controlling the sound from the computer. The second page (PCM inputs) showed the meters and controls for the PCM outputs. The VU meters worked with the PCM out 1 & 2, however, the level controls have NO effect on the output, the Digital Mixer didn't show anything on the output, the mute switches do not work either. I tried to find something under the settings and patchbay tabs that would allow me to change this, but to no avail. Under the Analog Volume tab, the DAC0 & DAC1 controls DO affect the sound output.

So at this point in time I would like to know how to get the slide levels & mutes to work in the mixer.

Overall this is the best gui control I have yet to work with and it does seem to be partially working. I have not tried to record with it as of yet.

Thanx for the info thusfar.

EDIT: Ok, I finally got it. It takes a while to figure out how as most channels are muted right off the bat, so you would get a false sense that the application isn't working. At any rate if you already have Envy24control set up, you just open it up and do this:

1) Click on the ANALOG CONTROL tab to bring up the analog controls to around 100 (all of them).
2) Click on the PATCHBAY ROUTER tab to bring up the controls to set up the patch bay. Set HW out 1 and HW out 2 to Digital Mixer
3) Click on the Monitor PCM tab and look at the first two mixer control sets that are labeled PCM OUT 1 and PCM OUT 2. This is where things get tricky. The controls represent a stereo mix, however the output for each channel on the Delta 44 is MONO. If you bring up both output together, you will get a PCM mono mix. For stereo unmute the LEFT side of PCM OUT 1 and the RIGHT side of PCM 2, now you can bring up the stereo mix using the left control of PCM OUT 1 and the RIGHT control of PCM 2.

That should do it for the digital set up for a standard stereo output. The only thing that I noticed that may be a shortcoming is that the channel 3 & 4 outputs of my Delta 44 can't be selected to the digial mixer output, but it does have direct PCM outputs.

The Monitor Input is self explanitory as that tab adjusts the input gain on the four channels. I have still yet to try this, but at least at this point in time I have gui control of my pcm levels.

As a final touch I dragged the Envy24Control icon in my start menu to the taskbar. I then right clicked on the taskbar icon and chose to "Lock To Panel". Hopefully it will stay there on next boot up.

So at least that takes care of sound control in Ubuntu Studio. Now I am wondering if I can use Envy24Control in my other Linux distributions .

Thanx for the help and advice!

Geo

great to hear you finally succeeded
now that you have a working setup, I wouldn't fiddle around too much with distros if I were you. Anyway, when you have some music sort of completed, it would be nice to hear it, just curious, after all these months, it must feel like you want to focus on music, right ?

If you don't want to disclose you stuff, that's fine too.

thorgal wrote:great to hear you finally succeeded
now that you have a working setup, I wouldn't fiddle around too much with distros if I were you

Why not?? I am finding out quickly that certain distributions are better for certain tasks that others. I will say that overall there were a few standouts in terms of what I liked and more then likely I am just going to stick with these distributions:

1) Ubuntu Studio: I mostly intend to use this as my main OS. All of my housekeeping (emails, web surfing, youtube, document creations, etc) and audio recording will be done here.
2) Puppy Linux: The next distribution I will continue to use. This distro is application specific. Because of Puppy's small size and fast speed, I mostly intend to use this for I/O control experiments and more advanced control of video game systems such as MAME. Currently I am using it as a base for control application that features a virtual pipe organ. The biggest advantage to puppy is that the entire operating system and associated programs for my tasks can fit on a memory stick...thus it would be an easy copy over or installation to other machines for the intended task at hand. It is a little harder to move around and copy files in Puppy, but it is still very much doable. Puppy COULD easily be used for full housekeeping as well, but as I said, I have Ubuntu Studio for that.
3) Dynebolic: This distribution can run without the need for partitioned space on the hard drive. It is basically an all in one DA/VW (Digital Audio Visual Workstation). I primarily want to use it for it's Cinelerra video set up for audio and video editing. It is a compact distribution and like Ubuntu Studio, it comes set up with quite a few DAW applications such as Ardour, Jack, Muse, and Rosegarden. It can run off of a Live CD or from a hard drive directory. Thusfar I been having a bit of a problem getting Cinelerra to work properly and I have not been doing too much in this distribution, but it has caught my interest and I will continue to experiment with it. As of now I am not sure if I am going to keep it. If I can get those applications with Cinelerra to run in Puppy...then I don't have a need for Dynebolic. But for now, using it should cause no harm as it doesn't need a permanent hard drive installation.
4) OpenSuSE 11.0: This is the new kid on the block for me. I just decided to try it out because I wanted to see what a KDE/Red Hat platform looked like and OpenSuSE seems to be the most popular of the Red Hat distributions. I only started to dabble with it the past two weeks. It really does look like a nice, well polished, distribution. But it is a pretty big installation. Definitely not light weight. Open SuSE does have a DAW based distribution called JackLab and it does hold some promise, but as of now the (community) support base for it is very small.

I have tried out 64Studio as well, but that proved to be a disaster. I found it very hard to do simple tasks and housekeeping and thus went back to Ubuntu Studio.

So really for the most part, I am going to stick with the four distributions above and see which suites me the best and for what specific applications.

Anyway, when you have some music sort of completed, it would be nice to hear it, just curious, after all these months, it must feel like you want to focus on music, right ?

If you don't want to disclose you stuff, that's fine too.

That may be still a long way off. Since I had so much trouble with getting audio to work up until now, I really have not played with many applications in Linux. From what I gather both Ardour and Rosegarden have a long learning curve. I only recently figured out what to do in Jack and I been using that with Mixxx (a DJ mixing program). I have yet to even scratch the surface with Ardour or Rosegarden, so I am open to suggestions to good guides to learn how to mix with them. I DID do a basic test with Ardour connected to Jack and it does work...but outside of that I have not been doing much messing around. It looks like there is alot to Ardour and I am going to need some additional information on how to work it.

So it will be a long time before I start creating mixes with it. The good news is that now I can start to learn to use all these programs as the past four months I spent battling system configurations with sound devices that were not suited for my tasks or just simply wouldn't work right in Linux.

Geo

OpenSuSE 11.0: This is the new kid on the block for me. I just decided to try it out because I wanted to see what a KDE/Red Hat platform looked like and OpenSuSE seems to be the most popular of the Red Hat distributions. I only started to dabble with it the past two weeks. It really does look like a nice, well polished, distribution. But it is a pretty big installation. Definitely not light weight. Open SuSE does have a DAW based distribution called JackLab and it does hold some promise, but as of now the (community) support base for it is very small.

Actually, the only similarity between OpenSuSE and Fedora/Redhat is that they use RPM for package management. Otherwise they are completely different and unrelated.

If you want to take a Fedora distro for a spin try FC8 with the Planet CCRMA addons.