Hi Everyone,
I’ve got 2 questions, and one of them requires no introduction:
- Does anybody have an actual working setup with the HDSPe card (either the expresscard one or the PCIe one) and a Multiface II? If so, what are you using? And what OS/kernel?
My other question:
- Why doesn’t it work for me?
might benefit from some background info:
I bought an RME multiface II and HDSPe card (the expresscard host interface) a few months ago and so far it’s been a massive pain to deal with. At first, it was merely finicky, plug everything in, maybe it works, if you’re lucky run:
hdsploader
hdspmixer
and everything’s fine. Sometimes the card didn’t even show up in the lscpi output.
So what can I do? Unplug everything, turn it off, turn it back on, usually stuff works.
I started having trouble where I would get the card recognized in lspci output, but have trouble with the firmware:
hdsploader
hdsploader - firmware loader for RME Hammerfall DSP cards
Looking for HDSP + Multiface or Digiface cards :
Card 0 : RME Hammerfall DSP at 0xf7c00000, irq 18
Upload firmware for card hw:0
Hwdep ioctl error on card hw:0 : Device or resource busy.
Something that I learned back when the card was merely finicky instead of completely non-functional, was that you can get this error if you’ve already loaded the firmware, in which case you’re supposed to fire up hdspmixer and start recording. (I’ve always had to do a ‘reset to defaults’ in hdspmixer before I could use the card). So I’ve taken to trying to start hdspmixer first, then trying to load the firmware if that fails. I still can’t get the thing to work, though. While the internet knows about this error message, I’ve tried everything suggested that I’ve come across already:
*) Try a different version of the the alsa-firmware
*) Try a different kernel
*) Unplug everything, plug it all back in, try again (that used to work)
Eventually, this thing basically quite working entirely. I even tried to load the thing on windows (no luck). Shipped it to Synthax (RME’s North American Support partner), they said it looks fine to them, shipped it back.
The thing still doesn’t work, I’ve tried it in 5 different computers (booted all with linux and also windows on 2 of 'em). It hasn’t worked in any of them. On windows, totalmix recognizes the the HDSPe card, but not the multiface II. On linux, I can usually see the HDSPe card in the lspci interface and start hdsploader, but I can’t actually load the firmware.
I"ve tried running the firmware flasher on windows to flash the firmware on the HDSPe card to rev. 20, then downgraded by to rev. 18. I’ve tried a number of different linux kernels, and a few different versions of the RME firmwares from alsa-firmware-utils.
Nothing works. I’m basically at my wits end with this thing.
Anybody here got any ideas?