Hello all,
My name is David Seymour and I work for Mytek Digital. I have been following the Ardour project for some time and I want to build a rig for myself using our converters and the RME AES32 card. I have used the Lynx card under OSX but I have heard that the RME cards are better supported for Linux use. If anyone is using the RME card successfully please let me know. Thanks so much.
I’m using the RME HDSP 9652, which is a fantastic card. It can be used with smuxing to get 12 simultaneous ins and outs at 24-bit, 96-khz, and I think you can do software double-smuxing to get 192khz, though I haven’t tried that myself. The support is fantastic. I haven’t even had to download drivers for any distribution I’ve tried–it’s been, literally, plug and play.
The one irritation I have is that on bootup, all mixer channels are silenced. I have to open the mixer application, and then it sets the mixer channels to unity gain in a sensible manner. I’ve spent an hour before, chasing problems with my converters, software, etc., only to find that the problem was the software mixer channels not being set. Annoying.
If you have Alsa properly installed and setup, you should have an init script to save the mixer settings when halting the system, and to restore settings when booting up again. You may not have the init script set up to run. (How to set it, and at which run-level may vary by distro)
If for some reason the init script is not availabl, you can do it by hand using “alsactl store” and “alsactl restore”.
I use an RME Hammerfall…it’s a paradise under linux !
About the mixer problem, I may be mistaken, but alsactl store/restore doesn’t work for me. it seems tha the mecanism of the matrix mixer is too different from a classical card to tore settings like this. You can still make a start-up script that sets the right parameter at bootup using amixer.
interacting with the matrix mixer with amixer is described here. Making a script that sets custom volumes on all channels is easy given the explanation in this article.
Marc-Olivier Barre,
Kinoko en Orbite