Psychotronic wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:21 am
I'll join the Arch AudioFire12 club in a few days, they're really cheap on ebay now.
Ardour kinda works like a Multitrack Tape Recorder. If you come from Logic you could also try reaper. Both are good. I use Mixbus, which is a extended Version of Ardour by Harrison Audio.
You should check out qpwgraph for Pipewire inter connection stuff and RaySession as a manager to recall sessions with multiple pieces of software / hardware and virtual wiring.
I'll check those out. I'm pretty happy with Ardour so far, though there's a few annoyances I hope I can figure out how to fix.
As far as the Audiofire goes, it works really well but there's a few things you have to deal with. The ffado-mixer is kind of buggy, and it can't save settings to the device. I'm trying to figure out how to control it by sending commands to ffado-dbus-server but no luck so far. In order to change settings on it and save them you'll want to dual-boot into another OS (I use MacOS) where the Audiofire Mixer app can save the settings to flash memory. But if I can figure out how to send commands to it through ffado I won't need that, I can just run a script at login. Also even when settings are saved, ffado-mixer shows the level sliders wrong the first time you open it... the levels are actually correct (whatever is saved in flash memory) but the sliders will be in the wrong positions. If you move them, they will align properly but before that it will show a bunch randomly turned down to zero even though they are really at max. The mute/pad buttons do seem to display properly though.
Another big problem I was having was with the sample rate. But I finally got all that sorted out by changing pipewire settings. I prefer to just have it forced to 44100 all the time, something pipewire seems to really not like. After a reboot, no matter what you do, pipewire will be in 48000 and it won't switch until you start playing a sound... which means the first second or so will be all garbled. I fixed this by making a login script which always switches to the Audiofire and then plays a 2 second wav file that it just silence to make it switch to 44100.
Another minor issue which doesn't have anything to do with music production is that wine/proton games in Steam cannot use the Audiofire. I am assuming this is the same for any firewire audio device. Idk why... winecfg shows it in audio settings it but games don't see it. Some games will even be playing sound but pop up an error anyway saying you have no audio device. So if you also game on your Linux PC like I do, you have to switch to a different audio device for that. It's dumb but not a big deal. It works properly for audio plugins using wine/yabridge and that's really all that matters.
The Audiofire12 really is an amazing bargain. I can't see myself switching to anything else... non-firewire audio devices with that many inputs are outrageously priced.