Focusrite Scarlett Gen 3 4i4 (and others)

[geoffrey]

@geoffrey I sent you the money needed for the Clarett+ 4Pre to the go fund me.

@zeiktuvai, I'm overwhelmed by your generosity! Thank you so very much for your substantial support of this project!

I'll be right back with some kernel support for the 4Pre . Please email me (g@b4.vu) and I'll assist you getting it going soon.

[zeiktuvai]

Absolutely, thank you for spending your time providing this service to the community doing a job the company should be doing.

I do have a small favor to ask, when working on the 4pre if you happen to figure out how to get computer audio out of the Device (it shows up as an audio output in both Linux and a Windows VM [but also focusrite control is confusing af]) I would be grateful.

[geoffrey]

Absolutely, thank you for spending your time providing this service to the community doing a job the company should be doing.

I do have a small favor to ask, when working on the 4pre if you happen to figure out how to get computer audio out of the Device (it shows up as an audio output in both Linux and a Windows VM [but also focusrite control is confusing af]) I would be grateful.

For sure! Get in contact with me privately and I will walk you through setting it up personally.

[peterfh]

Currently have an Gen 1 18i20 which I am thinking of upgrading. Will be interested in seeing your thoughts on the 4i4 and Clarett. (Have contributed to the GoFundMe.)

[geoffrey]

Currently have an Gen 1 18i20 which I am thinking of upgrading. Will be interested in seeing your thoughts on the 4i4 and Clarett. (Have contributed to the GoFundMe.)

Hi @peterfh,

First, thank you for your donation! When I was drafting this reply to you, I wrote "We've almost raised enough for a Solo Gen 4 as well now", but we reached that goal today!

I'm not sure how useful my thoughts will be to you as I'm no audiophile or interface connoisseur. I'm not sure that my "studio" setup would let anyone distinguish between the quality of the Scarlett Gen 1 vs 2/3/Clarett, let alone me! I just write the driver .

Overall, I think all the interfaces are generally great. I had one 4i4 let out the magic smoke, but that was repaired under warranty.

My use cases aren't very demanding. I generally use:

• the 18i20 Gen 2 as an audio interface (S/PDIF from my mixer to USB) and headphone amp (route from analogue inputs to 2 headphone outputs),

• the 18i20 Gen 3 as a submixer, and

• the 4i4 Gen 3 as my day-to-day desktop interface.

I set up the routing in the 4i4 so that I can hear myself from the mic through headphones only, but computer output goes to both headphones & speakers, and I use the two volume knobs on the front to turn up headphones or speakers according to what I'm using.

4i4 Gen 4 thoughts: I'm not convinced yet about the power setup for the 4i4 Gen 4. It needs more power than the 4i4 Gen 3 and so far I can't get it purely bus-powered or powered from the supplied brick. It seems to work best at the moment with a USB-C to USB-C cable to my laptop for power plus another USB cable to my laptop for the actual USB connection. If it doesn't have enough power it will either not work or it'll work until you turn the volume up too high and then shut down. It's also taller which was probably necessary to make room for the buttons, but I'm preferring the slimmer 4i4 Gen 3 right now.

I do like how the Gen 4 has digital gain on the inputs. It does irk me on all the other series how I can't set the input gain exactly the same for a pair of stereo channels (unless it's all the way up or down).

The Clarett+ 4Pre to me looks like a lot like an 18i8 Gen 3, but again, I'm the wrong person to ask on this. I'm just going to make it so you can control all the features from Linux .

Best Regards, and thanks again,
Geoffrey.

[geoffrey]

I forgot to say this before: in the "other exciting news category", the mixer driver for the Scarlett Gen 2/3 and Clarett interfaces will be enabled by default in an upcoming kernel release (not 6.6 which is already in 6.6-rc2, but 6.7 I guess).

https://mailman.alsa-project.org/hyperk ... KASMFAXQN/

I wrote:

I think it's time to enable this driver by default because: [...]
Therefore, patch 1 in this series proposes to enable the driver by default, but provide a new device_setup option to disable the driver in case that is needed.

and Takashi replied:

Applied all four patches now.
Thanks.

So, no more need for device_setup=1 soon! If you want to try a kernel with those four patches, see this release: https://github.com/geoffreybennett/scar ... g/v6.5.3c1 which also includes Clarett+ 4Pre support.

[wander]

Hey, I'm considering buying a 4th Gen Scarlett 4i4 and was wondering how the out-of-the box experience with the latest kernels (>=6.5) looks like? Like what is working and what isn't and what workarounds (if there are any) are needed to get it to a usable state?

Thanks!

[wander]

I'm especially curious how the direct monitoring works, since there are no hardware buttons for that on the 4i4. Like is it accessible from the alsa mixer and is the setting persistent across restarts; that at least would allow me to enable direct monitoring with the Windows software once, and keep using it on Linux?

[wander]

So I got curious and just ordered a Scarlett 2i2 4th gen a couple days ago. Here's a short summary of what works out-of-the-box (OOTB) on Linux 6.5.8 and what doesn't:

• Audio output works OOTB and it sounds great:

  Code: Select all

  > aplay -l 
  **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
  card 0: Gen [Scarlett 2i2 4th Gen], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
    Subdevices: 0/1
    Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  

• Audio input works for both input channels OOTB:

  Code: Select all

  > arecord -l
  **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
  card 0: Gen [Scarlett 2i2 4th Gen], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
    Subdevices: 1/1
    Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  

• Every feature which is accessible with the hardware knobs works perfectly fine and those settings are persistent across reboots
• There are no controls available in the alsamixer
• Features which are only accessible by software (with the Focusrite Control 2) are also persistent (e.g. I set up monitor mixing once in a Windows VM and it's now working on Linux as well)

[dingodoppelt]

Hi there,
I just got my 4i4 3rd gen today and it does work OOTB but not with the driver enabled via options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8212 device_setup=1
dmesg shows everything setup correctly but aplay, alsamixer, pulseaudio and alsa-scarlett-gui can't see the device.
Without the modprobe config file it does work though.
I think I'm doing something wrong. checked with kernels 5.15 and 6.2

[geoffrey]

Hi there,
I just got my 4i4 3rd gen today and it does work OOTB but not with the driver enabled via options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8212 device_setup=1
dmesg shows everything setup correctly but aplay, alsamixer, pulseaudio and alsa-scarlett-gui can't see the device.
Without the modprobe config file it does work though.
I think I'm doing something wrong. checked with kernels 5.15 and 6.2

Hi @dingodoppelt,

That's not good news. Can you contact me by DM and let's do some debugging.

Thanks,
Geoffrey.

[dingodoppelt]

It now works with the driver enabled!
I had to use a different usb port to make the driver work. with the driver disabled it still worked with pulseaudio and jack.
With the driver enabled I launched jack and found that my previous configuration had to change. It doesn't work with 2 periods, so I switched to 3 periods and it works flawlessly on 48 samples buffersize (haven't tried less) and a samplerate of 48kHz now.

this setup now works for me with the correct usb port:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/jackd -S -R -P95 -dalsa -dhw:USB,0 -r48000 -p48 -n3

Thanks to geoffrey for getting back to me so quickly and helping me out

[Philix]

Hey @geoffrey,

on the search for a new, linux compatible audiointerface, i found this thread!
Im a RME Fanboy, but after reading this stuff i will leave my Babyface (the old one) behind and buy myself a Focusrite Scarlett Gen 4 4i4 and enjoy more then 2 ins and outs, a mixer, updates, etc under Linux

So thanks for your work, i made a donation!
Phil

[geoffrey]

Hey @geoffrey,

on the search for a new, linux compatible audiointerface, i found this thread!
Im a RME Fanboy, but after reading this stuff i will leave my Babyface (the old one) behind and buy myself a Focusrite Scarlett Gen 4 4i4 and enjoy more then 2 ins and outs, a mixer, updates, etc under Linux

So thanks for your work, i made a donation!
Phil

Thank you so very much!