Anything I can do to improve firewire performance?

[fizzlepop]

I'm trying to get an old M-Audio Profire 2626 working well with an old Lenovo W520 laptop. Everything seems to be working, but I'm getting some light clicking at playback. Changing the buffer size has no effect on this. Running an rt kernel also has no effect.

Should I give up on getting this working smoothly and just get a usb audio interface instead? Maybe there is something that I'm missing here that would get rid of the clicking. I'm really just looking to route stereo i/o from my hardware mixer into an interface.

[fizzlepop]

I found a post on this forum and at the Harrison Mixbus forum about how firewire devices can be ran two ways. It seems that the kernel has builtin drivers for firewire audio devices which need to be blacklisted in order to use the ffado firewire audio drivers. Following the instructions for doing that seems to have gotten rid of the light clicking noise. Yippee! Just doing this:

http://mixbus.harrisonconsoles.com/foru ... -3610.html

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf

add this row:

‘blacklist snd_dice’

Save
Roboot

Then I started Jack, selected 'firewire' as the driver, and the only interface choice was 'default', so I left it there. It is working with Jack anyway, but not when selecting ALSA as the driver in my recording software, which doesn't make any sense to me. But at least it is working with Jack.

Now I'll have to see if it will record without problems.

[fizzlepop]

I switched back to the regular kernel and everything seems to be running well with playback only and about the same cpu performance.