I have, after many years of dabbling around the edges of Linux music, been forced this week to take the plunge and make Linux my main operating system following the untimely death of my trusty MacPro.
One of the things that has held me back from this change has been my trusty Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 Gen 1 Sound card which doesn't appear to like Linux (I bought it about a month before the Gen 2 was announced
). When I first started playing around (with Debian Jesse) I discovered that it was a bit sporadic and wouldn't work reliably. It appeared that a message was being sent to the card by the OS which caused it to crash. I did however discover that it appeared to work perfectly with Ubuntu Cosmic so that became my chosen OS, even though it wouldn't utilise my after market graphics card.I have this week built a whole new computer and installed Ubuntu Focal onto it. All appeared good and its worked reliably for the past couple of days. When I started the computer up this morning, to do some video editing all was not well. Try as I might I couldn't get any sound out of it using Linux. I rebooted through into windows and after turning the card off and on again sure enough I could get some some sound.
The card is showing up in the settings pane.
It would appear that the old problems have returned, the card is loaded with a default mix which echoes inputs 1 and 2 through to outputs 1 and 2. If I turn the card on without any USB this mix comes to life. The moment I let Linux loose on it this mix stops working but the VU meters do still respond. Even more if I unplug the USB and plug it into another computer or simply re-boot into Windows the card won't respond until it's been power-cycled. Which is the behaviour I saw previously in Debian.
Does anybody have any experience of using the 18i20 Gen 1 on Linux? or does anybody have things I might try to get to the bottom of what's going wrong?
I do know from my Mac experience that it is possible to crash the card if you select an incorrect sample rate, bit depth and number of channels combination. It won't let to run 88.2 or 92 kHz with more then 16 channels, so I wonder if this is what's happening.
Thanks
Russell