LinuxMusicians

This is a USB2 unit with 1 microphone in, 1 DI in, stereo audio out and two headphones outs. 150€ street price in Europe. Reviews are good, especially about the quality of the preamp.

I needed a travelling audio interface for my laptop, I run actually a 16.04 Ubuntu Mate distribution with the KX repositories.

The Audient ID4 is class compliant, although there is no much information about compatibility with Linux, I decided to take the risk and bought it today.

Jack shows 4 audio in / 2 audio out : that's correct, given we have
Inputs : 1 preamp + 1 DI + 2 monitoring (we'll see that later)
Outputs : stereo out

Now the question : does it works ?

Yes !

I have yet to tweak latency and sample rate, but I had good results with 44100khz/512 samples and 48000kHz/1024 samples. Of course this is a first short working test.

I'll post more soon, but it could a good new, because if it works, the other boxes of the Audient range ould work also : ID14 and ID22.

A little more information : there is no dedicated software for the ID4, that means that even with Osx, Windows or Ios, all functions are working 100% hardware. So you have the same with Linux :
- a general switch off audio : handy when audio goes nuts, can save your ears and your monitors
- a 48v phantom power for the microphone in, powered by usb
- a knob for mixing the sound coming from the computer and the direct monitoring of the ID4. Imagine that you program a drum track in your favorite sequencer, you can listen through the headphones the drum track while recording a voice or a guitar (or both) and adjust the mix directly on the ID4 (just don't forget to monitor off the track in the sequencer if you don't want to have an echo).
- a cool "gadget" : you can switch the main knob (which is for the headphone volume) to an emulation of your mouse scroll : imagine you want to draw a volume envelope for a track, you just have to place the cursor of the mouse on the volume slider of the track and voila, the big know can drive the slider (as long as your cat doesn't step on your mouse...)

Thanks for the report. It is always nice to get some information about certain interfaces working or not.

I am interested in the ID22 but I fear that the integration with the software mixing app makes some of the cool features useless on Linux. I just want a stupid interface with a couple of ins and outs, nice preamps and solid hardware switches and controls - which seems to be pretty hard to find. The SPL Crimson might be an alternative.

Did you go for the SPL Crimson and worked it well with linux?

HI there,

Apologies for resurrecting an ancient thread, but had a question about this. I recently got an ID4 MKII, and when I start up Jack w/ Ubuntu Studio Controls w/ the ID4 it sets off a constant stream of xruns, with nothing else running. Focusrite 2i2 was working fine before. I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 with a low latency kernel. Any idea what the problem might be?