getting my audio interface to connect

[belongumdave]

Hello All, I have a UMC22 audio interface. It does work on Windows. But I am not having much success at many linux distros.
At this point I do not understand the necessary packages and the order in which these are installed.
Moreover, is there some sort of road map to (or step by step) manage and confirm each connection the software is making?
I can see why windows is such a large program, as it includes any software that maybe or not needed. That makes it very easy.
Linux, is a choice, and all I want to know is how. At the moment I am using LinuxMint.
When a connection is made (say usb audio) how does the software allocate that connection? I have many instances where I a can get the input to connect (and do not know how I did it) but the output is not connected. I do not know, or how to make that adjustment, or how to know what packages are available to help make those connections. A bit of a quandary eh!
So very confused, but not giving up yet, thanks for any insight, regards, David

[bluebell]

Thow lower layer ist ALSA. These are the drivers builtin in the kernel. If the interface is USB Class Compliant then it will probably work.

On top of ALSA there are ALSA aware user programs like

• alsamixer
• Audacity

Now it' s getting complicated. On top of ALSA there are several system programs that want to make it better or easier:

• Pulseaudio
• JACK (for us musik makers, with low latency)
• Pipewire (which wants to be everything)

First step: Did ALSA recognize my audio interface? Useful programs are aplay and acrecord:

Code: Select all

hm@regen:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC892 Digital [ALC892 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: USB [Scarlett 2i4 USB], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

[Linuxmusician01]

@belongumdave: Audio connections can be confising (well, to me they are at least): Midi, INput, OUTputs, connections from hardware (e.g. an USB audio device) to software (DAW, synth), ... Pffff. No matter if you use Windows or Linux it's confusing to me. However, in Linux it's (needlessly?) even more complicated because of ALSA, JackAudio, PulseAudio, PipeWire etc. etc. (which I call a SNAFU).

Friendly forum member @bluebell explained it too. Here's my view on it.

ALSA is "the" audio driver for your hardware (e.g. for external USB devices like the UMC22, on-board sound card from your PC, etc.). You can compare that to the driver for your sound-card in Windows. However, it can only produce sound from only one software source at the time. Than means that, in principle, you can only listen to audio from the Firefox web-browser, or from an audio application like Audacity, etc. Nowadays that unworkable.

So Linux has "sound servers" that use the audio driver (i.e. ALSA) to "serve" audio to more than one application at the same time. That way you can indeed listen to a Youtube video in your webbrowser and audio from Adacity at the same time. There are roughly 3 popular sound servers:

• PulseAudio (PA)

• PipeWire (PW)

• JackAudio (Jack)

Pulse is the oldest solution but is isn't very usable for us musicians to have proper control over connecting hardware, software and MIDI. And it's not low-latency if I'm not mistaken. So enter Jack. Jack is better, but must be configured (i.e. you need to make connections): it's not dummy-proof like Pulse. Pulse works out of the box.

That's not very workable either. So enter PipeWire. It is better at both jobs and it's backwards compatible: it can emulate Jack and Pulse. I might not have used the correct term by "emulate" but it is what it looks like to us simple users... Software nowadays my work directly with PW but if it is somewhat older it might want to work w/ Pulse or Jack, in which case PW just says that it is Jack to the application.

The big question is: does the distribution that we install have PipeWire installed per default or does it still use Pulse? And if it uses PW, is it the latest and greatest version? Because PW is still, in my opinion, in a somewhat stormy phase in which the way you configure it and how stable it is changes from moth to month.

And if your distro uses PW, is your favorite software (e.g. DAW) ready for that? Tip for a DAW: use Qtractor (= Linux native), it's developer is active on this forum. Or use the Linux native version of Reaper (what you learn in Reaper can be used in the Windows and Mac version of Reaper too of course).

Good luck with all the confusion and keep asking questions.

[tseaver]

@Linuxmusician01

So enter Jack. Jack is better, but must be configured (i.e. you need to make connections): it's not dummy-proof like Pulse. Pulse works out of the box.

The easy alternative is to use a Linux distribution which already configures that for you (as well has the handful of other tweaks needed to get the best performance from your hardware). AVLinux is my favorite, but UbuntuStudio should work as well: before you choose, I suggest trying to record / playback on your device while booting from each distro's live / install USB stick.

[Linuxmusician01]

@Linuxmusician01

So enter Jack. Jack is better, but must be configured (i.e. you need to make connections): it's not dummy-proof like Pulse. Pulse works out of the box.

The easy alternative is to use a Linux distribution which already configures that for you (as well has the handful of other tweaks needed to get the best performance from your hardware). AVLinux is my favorite, but UbuntuStudio should work as well: before you choose, I suggest trying to record / playback on your device while booting from each distro's live / install USB stick.

I understand. For us experienced Linuxers distro's like that "take a lot of work out of your hands". Which is great. However, like some you may know, I personally advise against using any special distro for starting Linuxers. This is because there's more help to be found on the internet for mainstream distro's (Debian, Ubuntu etc.). I for one will not try and help someone w/ AVLinux or Ubuntustudio because I don't know how they're configured. But if you're comfortable with asking help in this forum to the people who have it installed than you're fine. I believe that the developer of one of those distro's is even active here one the forum so that's a big pro.

But then again: most of us don't know how PipeWire is supposed to be configured on the distro that we don't use ourselves either: it seems to differ from PW version to version.

[tseaver]

FWIW, I've been mucking about in the "try-to-make-music-on-Linux" world for about twenty-five years now: I've done all the accepted bits of tweaking:

• install a Linux-supported PCI sound card;
• muck about with various Linux kernels to get support for this hardware (lather-rinse-repeat for firewire / USB hardware below);
• try firewire, just for extra bonus masochism points;
• tweak an endless variety of boot-level / init.d / etc. parameters;
• try a dozen or more USB-based audio interfaces;
• faff around endlessly with ALSA / JACK configurations, trying to balance real-time performance goals vs. tolerable MIDI recording quatlity.
• faff around endlessly with WINE configurations to get a small handful of sample-based VSTi instruments working.

In the end, just installing a well-regarded / -supported AV-focused distro removes all that faffing about; given that I install it only only on a machine which does only AV recording / mixing / editng, I can't see any downside.

[belongumdave]

Many thanks for all the replies.
I did get my UMC22 to work with audacity, hoorah! exactly how I did that, well I did not keep a trail, sorry.
But getting into knowing what my LinuxMint could see, that what started to make sense (thanks bluebell). from this I started to look for other Terminal commands. I did go through alot, and did lose my thread.
But I will do a fresh install, and start again, so that way I will hope to get a handle on the trail of commands that I need to complete to have a stable outcome.
I am, also, not looking for a DAW, I am interested in amplifier modelling, so that I can create many effects, without buying any pedals. I am a cheapskate. (I used audacity to get somewhere with the hardware and software, as there is some reference to that program)
So, in the next couple of weeks, I hope I can come back to this thread, with something constructive, but, do not hold your breath
regards, David

[bluebell]

I am, also, not looking for a DAW, I am interested in amplifier modelling, so that I can create many effects, without buying any pedals.

Guitarix is a good start.