Wow - here we go!

Why not tell us a little bit about yourself? Welcome to the community!

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Martin A
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Re: Wow - here we go!

Post by Martin A »

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Sun Nov 13, 2022 12:32 pm

Sorry, only now I see that you mentioned firewire a few posts ago. . . . .

. . . . . Firewire is too much of a snake-pit for me.

That's ok, the Traveler and Phase24 are indeed Firewire only - no USB.
Motu made some brilliant interfaces - all Firewire or dedicated PCI until recently.
Drivers for many Firewire devices have been included in the Kernels since 5.14
The Traveler is a portable Firewire unit with 26 inputs.
It's still on sale.

Linuxmusician01 wrote: Sun Nov 13, 2022 12:32 pm

I take it that "Sparky" is a Linux distribution?

Yep, it's listed quite highly on Distro watch.

Manjaro was recommended by a clever Linux musician called Unfa. He has been on Linux for years.

Thanks for your help anyway.

Martin A
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Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2022 12:19 am
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Re: Wow - here we go!

Post by Martin A »

Impostor wrote: Sun Nov 13, 2022 1:28 pm

As for those CPU glitches, they may be possibly solved by setting your cpu's to performance mode instead of on-demand (if at all possible on your system). I do this with a script which works on Linux Mint.

Good idea - I'll look that up along with disabling sleep mode.

Martin A
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Re: Wow - here we go!

Post by Martin A »

Right, so now to bring this thread to a usefull conclusion.
I'm new to Linux but as a Beta tester from the early days of Samplitude (what's that? ) I new there are many reasons leading to apparent problems.

I had tested all variations I could think of except one:

Ardour!

I loaded Ardour with Pianoteq and tried both interfaces with ALSA alone and also with Jack.
Lovely GUI BTW - Ardour is a pleasure to work with.
I managed to crash Ardour once which made it fold up without freezing the whole system.
Apart from that, Ardour was rock solid.
Shame it uses so much CPU, one instance of Pianoteq runs between 65% and 95%
In Reaper 18% to 25%

I wrote about this on the Reaper Linux forum and found someone who had the same problem with ALSA Midi.
He too found that Jack2 somehow bypasses the problem.

So for anyone looking for a top quality multitrack interface on a budget, I can highly recommend:

Motu Traveler Mk1 - with ADAT up to 20 simultaneous inputs.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/motu-traveler

Motu Traveler Mk3 - with ADAT up to 28 simultaneous inputs.
https://www.musicradar.com/reviews/tech ... mk3-215586

The Terratec Phase 24 is probably not known so much outside of Europe, but it won so many tests back in its day for its converters and pro headphone amplifier.
Works great in Linux.

Thanks for your interest.

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