I have been just gifted a Focusrite 2i4, and so far I'm convinced it's either broken, malconfigured or I'm just an idiot - interestingly, these don't exclude eachother...
My system is Debian, I normally create music relying heavily on Jackd, and using internal HDA/PCH of my Thinkpad laptop. One peculiarity is that my Debian installation is fairly custom: I don't run a Desktop Environment (instead, I'm actually running Notion WM co-created by raboof who's a member here). I run Jack either by hand, or using qjackctl, but I prefer the former way. I won't go into my instruments and sequencers/trackers as that's hardly the point here.
Thing is I don't have Pulseaudio. And I don't plan to. I'm old enough to remember the world without it, and I see no benefits in it. But I'm not an ALSA-fundamentalist. On the contrary, I even tried to install pulse with jack plugins, to make the volume of my Scarlett go up (using pavucontrol or sth), but didn't work.
So, here's what happens. I plug in the interface, and alsa can see it. Looking at /proc/asound/cards, we have:
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cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
HDA Intel PCH at 0xf2620000 irq 34
1 [USB ]: USB-Audio - Scarlett 2i4 USB
Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 USB at usb-0000:00:1d.0-1.2, high speed
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aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: CX20590 Analog [CX20590 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: USB [Scarlett 2i4 USB], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
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jackd -R -d alsa -P hw:USB -C hw:H2n -r 48000 -p 128
Jack's output is (nonverbose) like this:
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$ jackd -R -d alsa -P hw:USB -C hw:H2n -r 48000 -p 128
jackdmp 1.9.12
Copyright 2001-2005 Paul Davis and others.
Copyright 2004-2016 Grame.
Copyright 2016-2017 Filipe Coelho.
jackdmp comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details
JACK server starting in realtime mode with priority 10
self-connect-mode is "Don't restrict self connect requests"
control open "hw:H2n" (No such device)
audio_reservation_init
Acquire audio card Audio1
creating alsa driver ... hw:USB|hw:H2n|128|2|48000|0|0|nomon|swmeter|-|32bit
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:1822:(_snd_pcm_hw_open) Invalid value for card
ALSA: Cannot open PCM device alsa_pcm for capture. Falling back to playback-only mode
configuring for 48000Hz, period = 128 frames (2.7 ms), buffer = 2 periods
ALSA: final selected sample format for playback: 32bit integer little-endian
ALSA: use 2 periods for playback
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ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:1822:(_snd_pcm_hw_open) Invalid value for card
Still, the system enters a state in which sound is redirected into the interface, starting something like MOC or Audacity shows no errors, one can press play and see scopes move, no sound on the interface however! I checked the Monitor and Line Outs on the 2i4, dead silent.
My brother, who gave the interface to me, has been using it in Windows, and swears by it. he said monitor jack port is loose, but works, other than that should be fine.
I've searched this forum and have seen people having success with Scarlett 2i4, does anybody have a clue?
Thanks
w