Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

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captainvideo_007
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Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by captainvideo_007 »

All,
I'm new he and new to linux, so please forgive me if I've broken some protocol. I volunteer at a not for profit radio station in the Washington DC market. The station uses butt (broadcast using this tool) for live remotes on an old beatup lenovo laptop with windows 7, I'm trying to move them into the Linux world and particularly with a Dell Vostro laptop with Ubuntu Studio for the paltform. They use the TAascam US122 interface which has been a real "BRICK" for them, it just doesn't break. I'm still very new to Linux but am willing to learn whatever is necessary to move them along. I've checked several boards and really have had no real luck, I can get the LED on the Tascam to light but can't seem to get audio into the laptop. I may have corrupted the enviornment on the Vostro so I'm trying again clean on my HP Pavillion, it's got an AMD A10 CPU/GPU; 16GB ram and a 2TB hdd. While I know this has more resources than the Vostro, If I can make it work here I can probably scale what I need on the Vostro. ALL help is welcome as I said I'm still somewhat a noob.

Thanking you all in advance,

Truly,

Bill
billssupport@gmail.com
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Michael Willis
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Re: Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by Michael Willis »

I think the first thing to find out is whether the Tascam interface is class compliant. It's not clear from their documentation, but the text from http://tascam.com/product/us-122/faqs/ does not bode well:
If you need drivers for a different operating system, you need to upgrade to one of our currently-manufactured audio interfaces.
You would probably have better luck switching to an interface that is known to work on Linux. It looks like the US-2x2 (the model that replaces the US-122) might work, as the specs claim that it is class compliant. Also, people around here are successfully using a variety of models from Behringer, M-Audio, Focusrite, and probably others.

I'm curious what your motivation is for switching to Linux. Of course most folks around here, if not everybody, are happy to see people showing interest in Linux, but I think we will all agree that there is quite a learning curve involved in being able to successfully use Linux for audio production.
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Re: Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by CrocoDuck »

Those units by Tascam are quite known in Linux world to not being very straightforward to use, although some support exists. Maybe these are good starting points:

https://alsa.opensrc.org/Tascam_US-122
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/TASCAM_US-122
Michael Willis wrote: I'm curious what your motivation is for switching to Linux. Of course most folks around here, if not everybody, are happy to see people showing interest in Linux, but I think we will all agree that there is quite a learning curve involved in being able to successfully use Linux for audio production.
I am puzzled by this:
captainvideo_007 wrote: I'm trying to move them into the Linux world and particularly with a Dell Vostro laptop with Ubuntu Studio for the paltform.
I mean, you don't actually have to explain your reasons to us, but it looks a bit odd, like you are trying to convert someone to another "religion". If you guys already have a solid proven workflow and tools then trying to switch to something else can be a real pain, especially if you haven't realistically planned ahead the time you will need to learn the new tools and get to the point your efficiency and productivity equals or exceeds the standards you arrived to with the previous tools. Not getting there in a short time is usually what creates disappointment among new users, and convinces many (wrongfully so) that Linux is inferior.

I guess the message is: being aware that Linux learning curve is slow, and have realistic expectations about the time you will need to get it up and running. I think 6 months is a realistic time to get to a stable setup you know how to use reasonably well.
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Re: Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by nikgnomicradio »

BUTT is a good tool for shoutcast/icecast streaming
It runs same on Linux as Windows
and available as .deb file to install on Ubuntu Studio

If you are only using BUTT from one sound source without other software, any gain in quality or reliability moving to Linux would be small
But if you want to add more tools for audio and broadcasting, there are some good ones to try
captainvideo_007
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Re: Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by captainvideo_007 »

Michael Willis wrote:I think the first thing to find out is whether the Tascam interface is class compliant. It's not clear from their documentation, but the text from http://tascam.com/product/us-122/faqs/ does not bode well:
If you need drivers for a different operating system, you need to upgrade to one of our currently-manufactured audio interfaces.
You would probably have better luck switching to an interface that is known to work on Linux. It looks like the US-2x2 (the model that replaces the US-122) might work, as the specs claim that it is class compliant. Also, people around here are successfully using a variety of models from Behringer, M-Audio, Focusrite, and probably others.

I'm curious what your motivation is for switching to Linux. Of course most folks around here, if not everybody, are happy to see people showing interest in Linux, but I think we will all agree that there is quite a learning curve involved in being able to successfully use Linux for audio production.
Michael,

to answer the curiousity, I started my computing life in MSDOS 2.1, so CLI isn't to intimidating even if I don't completely understand the commands I'm typing, beyond that I started using Mandriva about 3 years ago then switched to MINT (which I still use some) and then to Ubuntu Studio. I'm a GUI kind of guy right now but am trying to catch up in the CLI part of the world. I use the term NOOB because I'm not really up to speed as yet, but working on it slowly. As to the other audio interfaces, the radio station has a bunch of the Tascams so I'm kind of stuck there, be side the fact that ther can be had for next to nothing on eBay, and the station is a not for profit so money is always tight.
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Re: Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by CrocoDuck »

Just wondering whether you seen this linked in one of the pages I posted above:

https://github.com/mdnghtman/us122-linux

Looks like it is made for you. And it seems up do date: last update was one month ago.
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Re: Tascam US122 (NOT L) on ubuntu Studio 16.04.03 LTS Xenia

Post by Michael Willis »

Wow, that's pretty amazing that this showed up just a month ago, just before captainvideo_007 made this inquiry.
captainvideo_007 wrote:I started using Mandriva about 3 years ago then switched to MINT (which I still use some) and then to Ubuntu Studio.
Ok, so you're not as inexperienced as it sounded like. Now it makes sense that you are already a Linux enthusiast with some exposure to audio production on Linux, which makes me feel better about this whole thing. Just a word of caution, tread lightly, make sure you have all of your ducks in a row, and then make sure that you'll knock somebody's socks off ... (How's that for using three completely unrelated idioms in one sentence?) ... Talking people into using unfamiliar technology is already tenuous enough; if anything goes wrong they're likely to outright dismiss it, even if you can figure it out in another week.
I would suggest looking through the shell script and trying to become familiar with the commands that it invokes: https://github.com/mdnghtman/us122-linu ... -us_122.sh

That way if something goes wrong you'll have a better clue about what it was doing, and possibly how to fix it.

It looks like the flow is generally:

* apt-get to install a bunch of alsa related packages (as well as alien, which seems unnecessary based on the rest of the shell script)
* wget downloads the firmware package
* tar extracts the firmware files from the tar.bz2 file
* configure and install the firmware package
* reconfigure alsa so that it can use the firmware
* lsusb to determine the bus id and device id of the tascam interface
* fxload uploads the firmware to the interface
* sudo ln -s creates a symbolic link (kind of like a soft copy of a file), but I'm not sure why.

Be aware that this script is specifically for distros that use apt (Debian and all its derivatives, including Ubuntu and Mint). If for whatever reason you end up using a distro with a different package system, you'll have to adapt the script.

I don't know if this will happen, but it's *possible* that the firmware update may make the interface cease to work with the driver on your Windows machines, so to start out with I would make sure that you're either using an expendable interface, or you know how to restore the existing firmware in the event that something bad happens.
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