hints for stable setup for jack + ffado HELP

[lilakmonoke]

ive made a clean kxstudio install and i love this setup, thanks to falk for all the work he puts into it!

ive been trying to get a stable setup now for 6 months and countless hours and im still having about 3 jack crashes every day. i make electronic music so my setup is fairly complex with a fireface 800 multichannel mixer and lenovo laptop. after every jack crash it all comes down like a house of cards and it takes me a long time to set it all up again. no presets seem to work for ladish or qsampler so i have to do it all manually.

here is what i absolutely need to run stable:

- jack
- linuxsampler
- pd-extended
- webbrowser
- activities

i cant figure out what it is that crashes jack, it happens when i switch activities lately quite often, before it was the webbrowser. how can i find info about this, ive read the manual for kxstudio which is excellent. thanks!

[i2productions]

Run all your programs including jack from a terminal. That way you have logs of what caused the issue.

[lilakmonoke]

thats a really good idea! ive been starting everything from claudia so i have to find out the commandline versions of that first. my main proble is that i dont understand fully how jack works with all the different parts involved like jackdbus etc. is anybody else having jack crash like that? how can i find out the details?

[Shupacabras]

Cadence -> Tools -> Logs
there will have all the historical information about the error

[lilakmonoke]

i think i have two man problem areas:

- one i think is the alsa-jack bridge in connection with firefox. im trying to eliminate that by using the built in soundcard for everything alsa and firewire for the studio but then i get no sound in firefox. it seems to be set for the bridge thing.

- second is firewire, i run this with via pcmcia card. many times i cant even restart jack after a crash because somehow the firewire device is blocked so i need to reboot. even that doesnt work sometimes which i dont understand at all.

maybe i should just get another laptop with built in firewire like a macbook. does somebody have a good idea for a solid kxstudio laptop?

[lilakmonoke]

this is what i get when i cant restart after a crash:

Code: Select all

Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: JACK server starting in realtime mode with priority 89
Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: self-connect-mode is "Don't restrict self connect requests"
Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: ERROR: firewire ERR: Could not prepare streaming device!
Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: ERROR: Cannot attach audio driver
Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: ERROR: JackServer::Open failed with -1
Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: ERROR: Failed to open server

and loads of these

Code: Select all

Mon May 26 14:56:01 2014: ERROR: JackEngine::XRun: client = pd_extended_0 was not finished, state = Running
Mon May 26 14:56:01 2014: ERROR: JackAudioDriver::ProcessGraphAsyncMaster: Process error
Mon May 26 14:56:07 2014: ERROR: JackFFADODriver::ffado_driver_wait - unhandled xrun
Mon May 26 14:56:07 2014: ERROR: firewire ERR: wait status < 0! (= -1)
Mon May 26 14:56:07 2014: ERROR: JackAudioDriver::ProcessAsync: read error, stopping...

the last two jack crashes happenend when i switched to another activities desktop, so its something to do with the xserver?

[i2productions]

Code: Select all

Mon May 26 17:44:27 2014: ERROR: firewire ERR: Could not prepare streaming device!

That's your first error. And the biggest thing. I pretty much gave up on firewire in my setup. What I've found is it really has to do with the firewire firmware and chipsets. Some firewire gear works better than others on Linux. PCI and USB interfaces have FAR less issues when it comes to linux and audio. I know it's not the answer you want to hear, and hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I about Firewire cards in Linux can help you. Cause I've spent days pouring through forums to get my PreSonus FireStudio Mobile to work. I got it to work, but like you had many crashes and issues. Went back to the old M-Audio Delta 1010 and am happy. Though, like you I would like to use it on my laptop for mobile recording(even the drivers for windows are garbage and took me 3 days of reading forums and trying fixes to get it to work on that OS, rather unreliably.) Good Luck!

[lilakmonoke]

you are probably right unfortunately! im really big on high end sound and the rme fireface 800 is about the best deal in professional multi channel setup. i even sold my fireface 400 uc which was usb when i switched to linux! there is no rme usb interface supported the moment i think or has that changed? what other high end usb interface is out there that works with no problems? you think fireface works better on a mac probook?

btw here is a track i did last night that worked out well. the samples are out of linuxsampler and the rest is lots of live mixing with the fireface multichannels. just to show that it works sometimes really well ... the question is always how long
https://soundcloud.com/lilakmonoke/the- ... finisterra

[lilakmonoke]

so the main question that remains to be answered is: what is a stable firewire/ffado setup? i cant believe ffado is not working reliable or firewire itself is unstable. it must be the hardware.

is somebody running something like this:

- laptop, maybe macintosh
- built in firewire 800
- ffado based multichannel audio interface, maybe even rme fireface 800
- reliable with no sudden death crashes for jack or the system

if yes what are the hardware specs and setup? that would be really helpful. i really believe in linux and am ready to buy another machine (again)

[GMaq]

Hi,

Although I use it less than I used to I have had great success with an 'old' Mackie ONYX 1640 with the optional FireWire interface, I can easily stream in 16 channels of Audio with no Xruns at 256 fpp or less (I could go lower but I don't need to). This is used with an aging Dell Inspiron laptop with a Ricoh Firewire controller chipset. I have used this setup with various kernels over several versions of AV Linux. I say this to illustrate that it is possible to have a reliable working FireWire setup on Linux... BUT... The number one priority is to try and choose and use FireWire audio devices that are FULLY supported by FFADO, anything else will introduce unknown variables, secondly the type of FireWire controller chipset on the computer is another factor that varies greatly depending on which particular model and chipset you have, what is more frustrating is that selecting a particular brand of controller is no guarantee, the Ricoh chip in my laptop works very well but others report that Ricoh doesn't work at all. Lastly this may not still be the case but it used to seem that JACK1 was better behaved with FireWire devices than JACK2 but that may no longer be the case...

[skavar]

I am running focusrite and presonus on ffado with jack 2 and it has been very stable. I note that work is being done on the ffado fireface driver currently, and that there are some reports of trouble with the latest jack2. It may be worth swapping out jack2 for jack1 and see if you get a stability improvement.
Please see http://www.ffado.org/?q=node/1974
http://sourceforge.net/p/ffado/mailman/?source=navbar
for more info.

[lilakmonoke]

The number one priority is to try and choose and use FireWire audio devices that are FULLY supported by FFADO,

the fireface 800 is fully supported by ffado as far as i can tell. its really an amazing interface, the best part is that the new ffado mixer supports saving the mixer state to its flash memory. i usually have a very complex mixer setup with hardware effects routed in and control voltages for my analog synths and all this is available even after the crash

right now im running firewire throug a pcmcia card with a ti chipset because my built in ricoh base one doesnt work at all. in theory this should work well but i suspect its another problematic hardware layer.

what about macintosh laptops and their buit in firewire 800? i could get a second hand macbook pro 15 with dual core cheaply. does anybody have any experiences with those?

ill try using jack1 instead of jackd but have no idea how to integrate that into cadence. ill have a look at the python script and see if i can figure it out.

also this is a really interesting article on firewire in linux from 2012 and how it might be integrated into alsa. what became of that, is anything actually working already?

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entr ... t-on-linux

I'm currently hacking on a driver for devices based on the widely-used DICE chip. At this stage, it works only for playback, but I expect to support capturing, clock source selection, and synchronization of multiple devices soon. This year, there should also be drivers for Fireworks- and probably AV/C (BeBoB)-based devices, which would cover all devices except those from M-Audio, RME, and Yamaha.

[lilakmonoke]

here are errors i get with pd quite often. im not sure what this means exactly but i increased the block size in pd to "256" maybe that helps. its really great that there is so much help with this on this forum ...

Tue May 27 14:25:10 2014: ERROR: JackEngine::XRun: client = pd_extended_0 was not finished, state = Running
Tue May 27 14:25:10 2014: ERROR: JackAudioDriver::ProcessGraphAsyncMaster: Process error
Tue May 27 14:25:10 2014: ERROR: JackEngine::XRun: client = pd_extended_0 was not finished, state = Triggered
Tue May 27 14:25:10 2014: ERROR: JackAudioDriver::ProcessGraphAsyncMaster: Process error
Tue May 27 14:25:10 2014: ERROR: JackAudioDriver::ProcessGraphAsyncMaster: Process error

[lilakmonoke]

so i just had another crash when i was loading a gig sample file into carla. it was accessing the harddrive a lot and then im getting the "broken cd player" audio buffer repeat oszillator everything connected to jack comes down but im not sure if jack is still running. i never see a process called "jack" anyways even if it is running perfectly which i dont understand as well.

here is the error log ... where is the problem?

Tue May 27 15:05:10 2014: ERROR: JackFFADODriver::ffado_driver_wait - unhandled xrun
Tue May 27 15:05:10 2014: ERROR: firewire ERR: wait status < 0! (= -1)
Tue May 27 15:05:10 2014: ERROR: JackAudioDriver::ProcessAsync: read error, stopping...
Tue May 27 15:05:57 2014: ERROR: JackPosixProcessSync::LockedTimedWait error usec = 5000000 err = Connection timed out
Tue May 27 15:05:57 2014: ERROR: JackEngine::ClientActivate wait error ref = 13 name = vinyl606

[i2productions]

It's more than likely the pcmcia card. I've read tons of stories on how the majority of those cards are garbage for linux/music work.