Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

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kiat
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Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by kiat »

It's a neat bit of kit that I just bought at the weekend. And after some research which was a bit wide-eyed to be honest, realising I'd actually focused less on "it does work with Linux" but more on "its just what i want musically, I want it!, it looks like it should work on Linux". Funny how many Linux folk are eternal optimists ;-) http://www.presonus.com/products/Detail ... oductId=58

I've two issues:
- Firewire
I've never used it and so not set it up before. So I read up and loaded the module "raw1394" got all the ffado stuff on deb (all on an updated Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 , Thinkpad T410 laptop). I think firewire is working fine (am going to see if I can borrow a Firewire HDD today to check that). Here's what I get from jackd.

Code: Select all

kiat@kiat-glaptop:~$ jackd -R -d firewire -v4
jackd 0.118.0
Copyright 2001-2009 Paul Davis, Stephane Letz, Jack O'Quinn, Torben Hohn and others.
jackd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details


Memory locking is unlimited - this is dangerous. You should probably alter the line:
     @audio   -  memlock    unlimited
in your /etc/limits.conf to read:
     @audio   -  memlock    2888604
no message buffer overruns
JACK compiled with System V SHM support.
loading driver ..
SSE2 detected
libffado 2.0.0 built Mar 31 2010 16:21:44
04990728558: Fatal (ffado.cpp)[ 174] ffado_streaming_init: There are no devices on the bus
firewire ERR: Error creating FFADO streaming device
cannot load driver module firewire
no message buffer overruns
I think this is telling me FFADO is configured and working fine. It's just the device that is not recognized. Is there any debugging tool that can show Firewire messaging across the interface? (I'll ask on the software forum too).

- Presonus FireStudio Mobile
the FFADO website says it's unsupported, but some users seem to have got it working. When I've time I'll track them down and see how they did it.

Anyone here had specific experience with this unit?

Cheers,

-Kiat
UbuntuStudio, KXStudio, AV Linux on a Lenovo Thinkpad X301
h/w: Boss BR-80 ; Zoom B3 : Apogee One ; Alesis SR-16
basses: Fender Precision, Lakland Skyline JO5, Squire P-bass, AXL Jazz
steevc
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Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by steevc »

It's not looking too great for the Firestudio Mobile if Ffado say it's not supported at all. I don't know if anyone else would be working on it. It looks like some other Presonus models work, but they may have different chipsets.

The discussion at Ffado has some responses from Presonus saying they don't plan to support Linux. It seems we are too small a market to be worth selling to. I know a few manufacturers have been more helpful, so perhaps we should encourage them by buying their hardware. I know this doesn't help those who currently have unsupported hardware. At least there seems to be a thriving second hand market, so you can always sell the incompatible gear to a Windows or Mac user.

Having spent a lot of time trying to work out what interfaces work with Linux I've been trying to encourage people to use the wiki to detail exactly what does and doesn't work, preferably from their own experience. Otherwise you end up searching the web and finding all sort of out of date articles.

http://wiki.linuxmusicians.com/doku.php?id=hardware

Sorry I can't be more helpful with getting your interface working.

Steve
Sounds - http://soundcloud.com/steevc
Debut Album - https://steevcmusic.bandcamp.com/
Blog - https://peakd.com/@steevc/posts
Recording via M-Audio FastTrack Pro and Zoom H4. Got Korg nanoKONTROL and Zoom G3X plus Roland TD-07 drums

i2productions
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Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by i2productions »

I'm pretty upset about this too. I bought one seeing it used at a good price at a pawn shop. I didn't do my research. Kinda glad presonus isn't writing the driver for it. Their Windows driver sucks ass. It took me two days of reading forums and fiddling with the driver to make it work. Once I got though, its a pretty nice piece to use for my work in Acid Pro 7. But I only ever use it about once a month if I'm doing some synth stuff with Reason 5. Great sounding inexpensive piece of hardware, but I'm not holding my breath for it to work on linux ever. Glad I only paid $125 for it!
kiat
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Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Jun 15, 2011 8:11 pm

Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by kiat »

OK, I hate to say it about hardware but, Presonus Firestudio Mobile, you have me beat.

After compiling the latest trunk from ffado and jack, reading up everything on the internet (!) about this particular piece of shi^H^H^Hhardware and spending another valuable 2 hours on this, I'm throwing the towel in . Thanks steevc for your advice, I hope the market for these things is buoyant - am gonna try ebay. The shop I bought it from, Andertons in Guildford, refused to accept as a return over the phone. Am thinking of walking in as I did when I bought the thing and speak to the manager, if only to vent my frustration about not getting a refund.

Anyhow will try something else, perhaps the USB version or a Focusrite. Any advice welcome!
UbuntuStudio, KXStudio, AV Linux on a Lenovo Thinkpad X301
h/w: Boss BR-80 ; Zoom B3 : Apogee One ; Alesis SR-16
basses: Fender Precision, Lakland Skyline JO5, Squire P-bass, AXL Jazz
kasbah
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Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by kasbah »

Did you get this to work? Latest comments on the Ffado page seem to suggest it might work.
i2productions
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Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by i2productions »

As soon as I finish housework today, and my wife allows me some time to myself, I'm going to get on this tonight! Been waiting patiently for someone to figure out how this works. Will report on my findings, cause this is actually a nice piece(when used in windows!)
dirtyb15
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Joined: Sun Jan 05, 2014 2:50 pm

Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by dirtyb15 »

Not sure if anyone is still following this thread, but i have a firestudio mobile setup and after some tinkering, i have it running fairly well in linux mint 13. If you are still having trouble getting it to work let me know and i can walk you through how i got it running.
i2productions
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Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by i2productions »

Would like to get it working again. Didn't use it for a while, now I can't get JACK to start with it, Mint 13+KXStudio.
rusk
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Re: Presonus FireStudio Mobile (help!)

Post by rusk »

I have just deleted /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf and started jack with alsa backend. The only thing I adjusted is in/out ports count in jack configuration. Working fine so far. Built in firewire on dell d630. ffado-mixer is working.
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