16.04 and USB audio

[famouswolf]

Hi Everyone

Has anyone here tried 16.04 with a USB Audio device and are you getting problems?
I have a Scarlet 2i2 and it no longer shows up in the audio settings.
It doesn't show up in /proc/asound/cards either.
Doesn't show up in lsusb as well.
If I unplug it. plug it in again and restart pulseaudio it sometimes shows up
in /proc/asound/cards but not in the system preferences.

I have tried this with three 16.04 flavours (Unity, Mate, Gnome). Same thing.
I then downloaded the latest Antergos from the website, same thing.
I fired up a live 15.10 session and it shows up and works perfectly.
Fired up a live Debian 8 and it works perfectly.

Does anybody know of any update to pulseaudio, the kernel or alsa that might have broken
support for some USB audio devices. Or perhaps more troubleshooting tips.
Apparently some peoples wireless USB mice no longer work as well.

Thanks
Rolf

[eric71]

I've now tested Ubuntu Mate, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Studio with a Zoom R16 usb audio interface. It was recognized. I had some issues with Xubuntu - xruns and audio glitching where I shouldn't have them, but I think it was down to something I forgot or did wrong in getting things set up for realtime audio. Now I'm on Ubuntu Studio and it is working well. I didn't use Mate too long - although it is a REALLY nicely put together distro, there were just a few things I prefer about Xfce. It may be a device specific kernel thing.

[famouswolf]

Hmmm. I'll try different kernels and see if it could be that.
I see also that in 16.04 alsa-lib was updated to 1.1.0 where in 15.10 its at 1.0.29.
Jessie uses 1.0.28. Wonder if it could possibly be that.
Will give that a shot too.
Thanks.

[bunyi]

I didn't notice any problems with my Scarlett 2i4 on Kubuntu 16.10 and Arch

[ufug]

FWIW, no troubles or tweaks needed here with a 2i2 on Ubuntu MATE 16.04. Using the low-latency kernel from the Ubuntu repos.

[famouswolf]

I'm starting to think that its either my motherboard (unlikely because everything else works fine)
or its my Scarlett that is becoming faulty. I tried Debian again yesterday and it doesnt show up now.
For all distros now, it doesn't show up if I have it plugged in while the system is powering on.
If I let the system boot, disconnect it and then reconnect it, it works fine.
Or if I just leave it unplugged and only plug it in when the system is up, it works.
Never did this before. It started doing it this weekend after I install 16.04.

I'm going to try my old Behringer UFO202 when I get home this evening and see if it does the same thing.
Would really suck if it was the Scarlett that was faulty.

Thanks for the replies.

[racc]

My Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 also stopped working after updating Xubuntu to 16.04. dmesg was full of USB errors related to 2i2 when plugging it to the laptop (ThinkPad T430s). As far as I know, the 2i2 has partially broken firmware making it not really USB audio class compliant device. It needs some special treatment from the kernel.

My first idea was there had been some regression in the kernel related to this, but I hadn't yet chance to test other kernels than the stock which came with 16.04 during the update (I do not remember version at the moment.)

What exact kernel versions are working with 2i2?

Sort of nice to know that I'm not the only one struggling with the 2i2. Achieving low latencies is not possible. I've been quite disappointed to the device and the fact Focusrite does not seem to be offering a firmware upgrade in their website. Of course there is a possibility that there are different versions of 2i2 circulating already. I bought mine back in 2013.

[famouswolf]

I'm not sure if its a kernel issue.
I've tested this with multiple live sessions of distros with different kernels and
am now getting the same behavior with all of them (Only work when I plug it in after system startup)
Tried so far:
Ubuntu 16.04 - kernel 4.4 (Tried 4 flavours now. Mate, Gnome, Kde, Unity)
Antergos -kernel 4.4.5 (as of a few days ago)
Debian 8.4 Jessie Stable - kernel 3.16.7

Mine was working perfectly fine until a few days ago.
I'm more and more suspecting that its a hardware issue.

My 2i2 is fairly recent, bought it mid last year.
Quite disappointing.

[racc]

All right... I happened to find an another 2i2 from office, and now tested it at home. It worked. Then I disconnected it and plugged in my own 2i2, with same USB cable (and port) I used before. It works too! I experimented with this already on two days and nearly bought a new audio interface yesterday.

I have absolutely no idea what has changed here. I do not spot any relevant seeming package upgrades from dpkg logs since update to 16.04 on 22nd last week when the issue appeared.

dmesg messages which happened after 16.04 upgrade:
[ 2748.711525] usb 2-1.5.6: Product: Scarlett 2i2 USB
[ 2748.711528] usb 2-1.5.6: Manufacturer: Focusrite
[ 2754.230668] usb 2-1.5.6: 2:1: cannot set freq 44100 (v2): err -110
[ 2754.256392] usb 2-1.5.6: 2:1: usb_set_interface failed (-71)
Last line was flooding kernel message buffer. Occasionally between them:
[ 2802.589991] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: URB transfer length is wrong, xHC issue? req. len = 0, act. len = 4294967288

Well, maybe that was just some kind of random USB error... From logs it is hard to deduct what exactly happened. Definitely different USB ports were tested, but I couldn't deduct that from this log.

A detail which most likely doesn't play any role here, but anyway: newer of these devices has a sticker on the bottom with date 10/2013. lsbusb reports:
idVendor 0x1235 Focusrite-Novation
idProduct 0x8016
bcdDevice 1.ec

The older 2i2 with no date on the sticker has a different product id. This is a bit surprising. Also release number (bcdDevice) is lower.
idVendor 0x1235 Focusrite-Novation
idProduct 0x8006 Focusrite Scarlett 2i2
bcdDevice 0.cc

[CrocoDuck]

Hi there, I have a 2i4 that works pretty well with my Arch and also Ubuntu studio 16.04, which I only tried live. I was used to plug it and then turn on the computer but it stopped working this way few months ago for me as well. I have to plug it after boot. Performances did not change though.

[famouswolf]

Hi Crocoduck. Same for me. A little annoyance I will just have to get used to until and can get it returned.
Strange thing is that if for some reason I have my headphones plugged in to my onboard sound card and then
plug in the Scarlett, it doesn't pick up. If the headphones are out of the onboard card, the Scarlett shows up and works.
Still investigating a little on this side, but haven't found a solution.
My Behringer UFO202 doesn't do this and works perfectly every time.
Seems this is a problem with some SCarlett USB devices.

[CrocoDuck]

Strange thing is that if for some reason I have my headphones plugged in to my onboard sound card and then
plug in the Scarlett, it doesn't pick up.

Somewhat it does not surprise me too much. The Scarlett line seems pretty poor on the electronic side to me. I did not open mine cause I do not want to void the warranty (I think I still have a few months) but I got the impression that the circuit is realized to be as cheap as possible to manufacture:

• The very first one I got fried itself after I pressed the 48V button.
• There is crosstalk between every possible channel. You can hear signal leaking in the headphone channel when it shouldn't according to the potentiometers on the front. You can see quite impressive crosstalk between the output channels when streaming audio.
• Connectors are so cheap that they are dodgy already, both mechanically and electrically. Even after very sporadic usage. That could give some grounding problems I guess.

Maybe I should upload some plots of the measurements I did on the device...

Anyway, don't get me wrong: it is not a bad device. It is small, light, plenty of connections and it works well on Linux. Still, given that connectors and controls are cheap and fragile and that the electronics behave like pretty average consumer stuff I think it is badly overpriced. I have tried a Behringher FCA1616 and I think it is better in pretty much every regard, a part maybe for the controls (one pot needs to be tightened). it is a quite different interface tho.

I think that I will start sticking with Behringher stuff. I have an FCA202 at home that works damn good, but I did not measured the frequency response and distortion yet. You know, all the audio interfaces (a part the top notch converters units) just use IC codecs by third parties (Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic, etc...). The only differences are the preamps and auxiliary analog electronics. Is the frequency response flat and phase linear? Is the distortion low? Yes? No need for anything else. And Behringher seem to be good enough with these few requirements.

[Vitne]

Soon I'm installing Ubuntu Studio 16.04, so I'll get to test it out on my RME Babyface. From what I've heard, it works fine in ubuntu under "class compliant mode".

[famouswolf]

I've actually been seriously looking at the FCA202 for around a week now and it does seem
like a really good card. And its quite cheap. The only thing is I would need to get a PCIe firewire card
to connect it to and have no idea which ones work properly with Linux.
Are PCIe firewire cards generally supported or are they more hit-and-miss?

I think I've lost too much time trying to troubleshoot this and need to get back to
making music. Quite disappointed with the quality of my Scarlett.
It does seem like the electronics are thrown together for rapid mass production.
Some of them will surely work and some will fail. Guess its just chance.

[Vitne]

I can confirm that my RME Babyface is seen by Ubuntu Studio 16.04 and is working in "class compliant" mode, no problem. Well the main outputs work at least. Haven't had a chance to try recording, but all seems going smoothly.