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X32 XUF - USB audio in Linux??
Russell Ault:
--- Quote from: drew gandy on April 09, 2022, 07:12:18 PM ---Hmmm. I am planning to install Mixbus (commercial Ardour) on this machine eventually.
Here's what I did:
I swapped the XUF card for an X-USB. At first it was not showing up in the Sound panel or in Jack. Then I switched the X32 down from 32x32 all the way to 2x2 and then immediately I saw an overlaid message on the Linux desktop saying that it was switching to the X-USB card for system audio. It was almost like on a Mac where stuff sometimes happens automatically (whether you want it to or not). After that, I found that my 1 channel in and two channels out work just fine. And jack is not running. It seems that the 2x2 mode is functioning as a very basic class compliant USB audio device. The XUF doesn't have a 2x2 option. It's never been clear to me if the higher channel count settings were class compliant or needed special drivers. If they work for other folks in Linux then they must be class compliant as well?
Fedora is probably running a newer kernel? I wouldn't think that would matter. But I'll play around some more in the future. Perhaps try a few different distributions. But for now, I at least have a zoom mic.
--- End quote ---
Ah, okay, interesting. Something you should be aware of is that, unlike Mac (with its CoreAudio), there are a few different audio subsystems for Linux, typically suited to different uses. Some of these subsystems interact nicely (a classic example is that Jack—the audio subsystem typically used for professional audio applications—will often rely on ALSA—an older, lower-level subsystem—for non-FireWire audio interface support), while others do not. The default audio subsystem on most modern Linux distros is PulseAudio, which tends to prioritize flexibility at the expense of latency (and which doesn't coexist with Jack particularly well).
In your case, I'm guessing that you're trying to use PulseAudio with the X-UF, and for some reason the two aren't seeing eye-to-eye on the input side of things. This could be something as simple as PulseAudio being configured to ignore devices with more than two inputs (since these would be rare for the typical multimedia applications PulseAudio is designed for), or something more complicated (e.g. driver weirdness). Either way, my first suggestion would be to test out your X-UF with Jack rather than PulseAudio. A further suggestion (depending on your ultimate use-case) would be to switch to a more production-oriented Linux distro (e.g. AV Linux—I believe this one even comes with Harrison Mixbus pre-installed), which will have been tuned to better handle multichannel audio processing.
-Russ
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