Presonus Firestudio Mobile setup

[GoldSpanner]

Hi guys, hoping someone here can help me.

I'm trying to get my Presonus Firestudio Mobile working under Manjaro.

I have JACK, ALSA & FFADO installed, in addition to qjackctl.

Without doing anything, Manjaro does actually recognise it, and can playback audio through it, just with one issue:
Without any audio playing, the interface disconnects after a few seconds. Upon playing audio again, it'll take a couple of seconds to reconnect and then work fine. Ideally I'd like to stop it disconnecting as it's quite annoying.

I've tried setting it up in JACK, but setting 'driver' to firewire doesn't work (gives an error message and JACK won't start), and setting the 'driver' as ALSA actually stops it from disconnecting but then audio playback doesn't work.

I use it in Windows for recording and it works just fine. In Manjaro all I want it for is playback so I can listen to some music while programming, so I figure it shouldn't be too difficult to get going.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[aicram]

Hello,

I was using ffado for years with my Behringer fca202 firewire card. After many updates about a month ago ffado would not work with my fca202.
I then decided to try the new stack which involves the module snd-dice. It required blacklisting the old firewire modules in this file:

$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf

# Select the legacy firewire stack over the new CONFIG_FIREWIRE one.

blacklist ohci1394
blacklist sbp2
blacklist dv1394
blacklist raw1394
blacklist video1394

#blacklist firewire-ohci
#blacklist firewire-sbp2

After this I rebooted then went to alsamixer and there was my card, fca202. Once I chose that and probably rebooted I could use qjackctl and get some things working to my surprise. There was a bit more to all of this which is explained better in my two posts:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16941

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16919

I use linuxmint 17.3 cinnamon with the kxstudio repos and now use cadence and patchage so that all of my sound needs are covered. I am happy that the new firewire setup works well for me.

Hope you can get your firewire devices working.

Sincerely,

aicram

[GoldSpanner]

Thanks for your reply!

To be honest, I'd be happy getting it running just with ALSA and PulseAudio - I don't suppose you have any experience with that?

[aicram]

I do not have experience with alsa and pulseaudio without jack with my firewire device. However, when I first got the new stack(snd-dice) working, I was using alsa only and using audacity to test. It worked well that way, but was limited for me without jack.

I would believe you could use pulseaudio, too. I would install pavucontrol for sure. Once the new firewire stack is enabled, you hopefully would be able to choose your device in alsamixer. After that maybe it would show up in pavucontrol. Definitely not an expert about pulseaudio. Perhaps I would start a new thread asking about using only alsa and pulseaudio with your firewire device. I believe you would almost have to use the snd-dice setup to do so and not ffado, but not absolutely certain about this. If I find out more will let you know.

Will not try it myself, because it took me too long to get the setup I want.

Somehow this has to be possible.

Best wishes,

aicram

[GoldSpanner]

Thanks for your help Aicram!

I did actually manage to get JACK to start in firewire mode without error by blacklisting snd_dice, but after that my device didn't show up under firewire in JACK.
I realised that I probably could get it to work with more tinkering, but that if I did it probably wouldn't work in the way I want it to i.e. JACK seems to be designed to work primarily with a single audio stream from a program that was actually designed to work with it i.e. a DAW, and probably wouldn't work easily as a universal sound server for any program that outputs audio, which is more what I wanted it for (but maybe I'm wrong here??)

Anyway, in the end I've decided to just use the motherboard's audio output and take that directly into my amp - not an elegant solution but much simpler than trying to setup JACK!

Thanks again for your help though, maybe at some point I'll give it another go

Alex

[aicram]

Glad you have something working for you. Bet it sounds good, too.

If you ever want to try jack again I may be able to help you with it. By the way, I had to give up on ffado so I did the opposite that you did, and enabled
snd_dice. It works great for me with jack.

Enjoy your sounds.

aicram