Audient EVO 4 - Updates on Linux compatiblity.

Talk about your MIDI interfaces, microphones, keyboards...

Moderators: MattKingUSA, khz

Post Reply
pablogvieira
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2021 11:23 am

Audient EVO 4 - Updates on Linux compatiblity.

Post by pablogvieira »

Hello everyone.

I'm a musician from Brazil and I recently bought an Audient EVO 4 audio interface. I used it on Windows 10 for about a month and then decided to switch back to Linux (I use Linux since 2007, but I'm new to music production and I had never done it on Linux) and make my new device work with it.

I found a board post and a blog post, both by to1ne, on how to disable the loopback feature. Back in April and May 2020, to1ne and some other users reported that, by default, PulseAudio would set the loopback feature of EVO 4 to the main input, since it mixes all input channels into one.

However, I've been testing the audio interface on Ubuntu Studio 20.10 and Linux Mint 20.1 and that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore. There was no loopback audio input in any tests that I run. I ran some tests and here is my hunch on why loopback audio issues no longer exist (at least in my setup):

- Before testing the interface on Linux, I downloaded its Windows Driver alongside its proprietary softwares named EVO Control. I used EVO Control to update the intefaces's firmware.

- The EVO 4 was announced in January 2020 in NAMM 2020. However, in July 2020, Audient released new pieces of software for Windows, especially one named Loopback Control, which, as you can guess, gives you full control of the loopback feature via sofware in Windows. There were new firmware updates as well.

- When I tested the interface on Ubuntu Studio 20.10, I actually tried to make the loopback feature work without sucess. I opened QASMixer and it showed 4 inputs on my device: left, right, rear-left and rear-right. The last two probably refer to the loopback feature. However, I simply could not lift the volume fader in QASMixer - the would always return to -127db on those two channels(I'm not running Ubuntu Studio anymore, so I don't have screenshots for that).

- In conclusion: I think the new software and the firmware updates set the loopback audio gain to zero (or -127) by deafult, and allowed it to be controlled only by the Loopback Control proprietary software.

Therefore, after the firmware update, loopback audio is no longer an issue on Linux, since I think it's probably disabled by default and cannot be turned on again. So, it seems to me that EVO 4 is now fully compatible with Linux, after the firmware upgrade, and works fine with Jack and PulseAudio. It behaves as any other class compliant USB audio interface such as Scarlett 2i2 and Behringer UMC202HD.

So this is my contribution on this piece of hardware: based on my personal experience, you should be fine with making it work on Linux, as long as you plug it once on a Windows computer and update its firmware using the software provided by the manufacturer.

I really don't know if I'm right on any of this, but I just wanted to leave this post for anyone who has this audio interface or wants to buy one.

Sorry for my bad english. Any comments will be much appreciated.
Post Reply