Audio Interfaces Under Linux

One more: Behringer UFX1604, its a mixer, USB - audio interface and recorder. And works with Linux :slight_smile:

I’ve been holding myself back from buying its little brother UFX1204 for a couple of months, but I’m near breaking point :slight_smile: It’s only 375 euros, and the sound examples I’ve heard are very clean, clear and low noise:

I forgot to say that the UFX1604 and 1204 are both also class compliant 16 channel USB audio interfaces, so they work with Linux :slight_smile:

A&H Zed R-16 has 16 mic interfaces… Haven’t tested with the new ALSA kernel firewire drivers, but solid as a rock with FFADO.

I’m puzzled to see so many new Firewire based audio interfaces. Obviously the reports in recent years of the death of Firewire were (as Mark Twain famously put it) “an exaggeration”. Does anybody know why it’s still sometimes used in preference to USB2 and USB3?

I saw you have asked about u-phoria. I have Behringer UMC404HD under ubuntu, and I have had no problem with it.

Two issues:

I had upgrade my user account for jack (no related to the audio interface)
The only issue related to the audio interface, is a small problem when I configure jack with low latency (15ms or less), and I get some xruns. But, the hardware monitoring is very good, so, I record into a muted track, and use the hardware monitoring without any problem.

when I want record MIDI, I put the latency very low, so I have a lot of false xruns wich do not affect to midi recording.

@anahata

Performance of audio interfaces tended to be much better with Firewire than USB2, especially early on when the CPU usage of USB could cause issues. Along with this if using a HD on the same BUS (Not port) of USB things could go downhill fast.

USB3 is likely a different story, as it has more then enough bandwidth to keep up with high channel counts easily as well as using sizeable chunks for HD etc. without running out of bandwidth. I have not done any side by side test etc. to them though.

Finally for higher channel count solutions these days you are starting to see the emergence of network based infrastructures (Dante, AVB, Ravenna, etc. with AES67 starting to provide interoperability – note the STARTING) that honestly I am using Dante more often than anything to track larger channel counts. That being said I haven’t seen a good solution for Linux to tie into the live consoles and systems for this purpose yet. There was some work for AES67 interoperability on linux some time ago but I got the impression, not having tested it yet myself, that it kind of stalled. Audinate thus far has flat out refused to bring Dante to Linux sadly, so options like AVB and Ravenna utilizing the interoperability of AES67 to communicate with Dante could be an option that I haven’t explored yet. At any rate this is a method starting to pick up for tracking live concerts as well, and honestly I am not sure i would complain if it started replacing both USB and FW for audio (See MOTU’s AVB interfaces for instance as an example of the start of this, or Focusrite Rednet).

   Seablade

Is it possible to feature request this into JACK1 instead of waiting for propietary softwares to be released for Linux? The Focusrite Rednet product line looks really good using this Dante protocol.

Jack doesn’t have hardware drivers; it communicates with the outside world via ALSA, so unless I am much mistaken what you are asking for is an ALSA driver for AES67. Possibly ALSA drivers for Dante etc. too, but AES67 would be the easiest because its documentation is public and open, and it’s a simple audio-only standard that hopefully will be implemented by other manufacturers alongside their proprietary bells and whistles.

Possibly ALSA drivers for Dante etc. too

Dante is patented so I would imagine it can’t just be added to ALSA / JACK (at least it would be hard to imagine how this could be done within a GPL context)

Hmmm…is NetJack1 comparable to something like this?

@dsreyes1014

Netjack could be considered comparable, but is missing the discovery mechanisms that make things like Dante great. For instance I install a live sound network with Dante, and the moment I turn on the network, the auto-discovery and patching go into effect to make sure everything communicates with each other automatically once I manually set up the routing once.

AES67 has an interoperability method in it, that Dante is looking to work with(I believe first steps are in the wild now IIRC), and works with things like Ravenna, and hopefully AVB soon(? I haven’t kept up with AVB as much as I should have), so it would be good to tie things into AES67 support at this point I think. As Mike mentioned, legal issues may make supporting Dante difficult in Linux, and if Audinate won’t help would have to be reverse engineered to start with, and honestly is likely to be a headache. Having a comparable system with AES67 support though that Dante can talk to may be a decent middle ground.

@seablade

Thanks for clearing it up a little bit more I’ll start a new thread for this discussion because this really interests me and might be helpful info for googlers.

@seablade:
I had not heard of anyone working on Ravenna or AES67 support on Linux, do you have any references to that work?

Re: AVB that runs on layer 2 (raw Ethernet) not on top of the IP stack like AES67, so they are not compatible. The AVB spec has provision for transport over IP, but I don’t think anyone is using it yet, all the designs I have looked into run directly on the Ethernet layer. The clocking is also using IEEE1588 directly on the Ethernet layer, and AES67 uses IEEE1588 over IP, so there are enough differences you could bridge between them, but it would be difficult for direct interoperability.

@ccaudle

Take with a grain of salt until proof is shown, however when Dante first started picking up, one of the selling points WAS interoperability with AVB…

While Lectrosonics is hosting it, the document appears to be written by Audinate based on the branding on it, and matches my memory as well.

I am not really diving into technical details here, just giving broad strokes. Yes you are correct in that there is a revision of AVB that runs on IP, I have no idea who is using it or not, because frankly I rarely run into AVB at all at this point, as I said Dante has the crown for the time being in the live sound world.

In as far as Ravenna on Linux, can’t find any reference to it at the moment, thought I had heard about work actually looking hopeful in that direction at one point but can’t find it now, other than conversations like this…

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crc-mmbtools/uQ9s70yNr58

Which suggest it may not be all that difficult to get them running, and AES67 being a more open standard from what I have been told, it could work towards that favor. I do not know of anyone working towards that currently. Funnily enough there was some work by Intel on AVB on Linux IIRC though.

  Seablade

I would say lets take the Audio over IP conversations to the other thread…

https://community.ardour.org/node/13556

Confusing having it in two places.

  Seablade

@soundpro69,

I have M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R with 8 mic inputs. It works without problems with Ardour (in GNU/Linux).

More details in this article:

I also have E-Mu 0404USB which works perfectly with Ardour if using 44.1kHz or 48kHz sampling rates.

I have been using Ardour for seven years. I’m a big fan and I want to thank Paul and all developers for great work.

I’ve heard the Behringer Xenyx Q802USB works with Linux but my question is can I record two tracks (guitar and vocals) at the same time? or does anyone know of a low cost/portable interface that will let me record with at least two tracks at a time. I have a small home PC studio but I needed a light portable studio as I’ve been traveling a lot lately and Ubuntu works great on my old laptop.

any suggestions are welcome

@waderain the Xenyx series only lets you record the stereo mixdown, not the individual channels, so you could pan your two tracks hard left and right and then split the stereo channels to mono, but I haven’t tried anything like that with my FX1204USB so I’m not sure if that would give 100% separation on each channel. There’s the Behringer Uphoria UMC404HD that allows 4x4 on the cheap ($100) but I don’t know how the quality is.

@seablade I have to disagree with you about Behringer. IMO they make some great stuff for the money. I have the 12 channel Xenyx and it sounds great, and hasn’t given me any problems. Admittedly it only gives stereo input to the pc, but my space prevents me from tracking more than one person at a time anyway.

@braxtons12
I’ve looked into the Behringer UMC204HD, which is very similar to the 404. I read mixed things about that some say it has a background crackle and others say it doesn’t. I can’t get any info if the 204 works with Linux or not, I assume so but I don’t want to assume and plunk down money on something that’s not going to work. The two biggest things I need is at least one phantom power and being able to record two tracks, either vocal and guitar or two guitars or two vocals. I have some Behringer stuff and never had any problems with them so I’m not worried about the quality. Just if there are any other alternatives.

@braxtons12

I would suggest you work with them more then. General rule of thumb is if you have to depend on behringer, always carry two for when it breaks.

As I mentioned above, the x32 seems to be a standout possibly due to the purchase of Midas and their expertise, but most of the rest of their equipment ranges from poor dependability, to poor quality, to outright stealing of other people’s ideas combined with the former two.

To give one example of many I could give, I purchased 20 channels of behringer compression at one point as I didn’t have any other choice. Within 7 or 8 theater shows of 2 week runs and one week of tech, over half of them were dead. This is an exceedingly poor dependability record.

       Seablade