LinuxMusicians

Hi all. I've acquired a 4i4 and am having mixed luck putting it into use. I've disabled MSD mode so now I can see all the twiddly knobs in alsamixer. I can capture signal input. But for some reason I can't produce any output on the monitor ports (1 & 2). All I get is silence.

Is it possible to just use alsamixer to configure my 4i4 without first setting it up via the official Focusrite software? Or https://github.com/geoffreybennett/alsa-scarlett-gui ?

If it is possible...what the heck am I doing wrong? I have everything configured to the best of my understanding. I've used jack, etc. in the past via a Presonus unit, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with things. I put a bunch of windows full of details into this screenshot that attempt to show how I've set things up if someone wouldn't mind taking a look. It's too big to attach here, but you can see it at https://snipboard.io/NC5ixF.jpg.

One more related question... I have read of people using 256, 128, even 64-sample buffers with jack. I have to set mine up to 4096 to make the xruns stop. What's the magic trick for getting a low buffer size? The latency right now is 85ms. I'm running Linux Mint 20.3, which I believe is based on Ubuntu 20.04 if I'm not mistaken, and I've installed kernel 5.15.12s1+ Vanilla that Geoffrey Bennet packaged with his driver project at https://github.com/geoffreybennett/scar ... 2/releases.

Any help is much appreciated.

---UPDATE---

In alsamixer, the mute switch is just confusing, see my explanation below.

Not sure about the Focusrite, but can speak to latency in Mint 20.3. Default setup with no tweaks I can do 256 ify and 512 solid on a 2Ghz dual core. If I do the tweaks suggested by rtconfigscan script and install Liquorix kernel I can do a solid 48k/64/3 unless I get into some really intensive IR processing kind of stuff.

Bluzee, is this the product you mean? https://codeberg.org/rtcqs/rtcqs

Googling for "rtconfigscan" returns some confusing results...

Thank you for your help!

---scott

In alsamixer, the mute indicators appear to be reversed. The way to interpret them is "MM" means the feature is off, in other words, not muted. So if you have the indicator "on" (displaying the active green "00"), that means the mute feature is on and the channel is muted. Certainly confused me!

Bluzee, is this the product you mean? https://codeberg.org/rtcqs/rtcqs

Yes that is it. Sorry couldn't think of the correct name before and I was on my phone at the time so harder to look it up. Glad you found it. Those mutes get a lot of people.

I also figured out how to reduce my Jack buffer size from 4096 (85ms) to 128 (3ms)... I explained how at viewtopic.php?f=27&t=24378