Oh also, if you have any problems with your "new" Audiofire not starting up properly or not being recognized, this is a very common issue with Audiofires after this amount of time. There is one capactior by the cpu that is the "boot capacitor". When this cap gets old and weak, it stops booting. Mine started failing and would take several power cycles before it would come up, until one day it would no longer work at all.
It was extremely easy to replace this capacitor and get it back to working 100% of the time. I have attached the pdf file I found that illustrates this in case anyone here needs it. Depending on your particular Audiofire, you may need to replace one or two caps. Mine only needed the middle one.
Not sure if that is solved or if we should really use old firmware. I'd like to run it with the lastest.
Is this supposed to fix the buggyness in ffado-mixer? Or is it just outdated information? Because I'm using the most recent firmware and it works fine, but it has the quirks I mentioned.
Not being able to save the settings to flash is not really important if you can set it up how you want and leave it that way... which is what I do. You shouldn't rewrite flash all the time anyway, flash memory that old is likely to fail with too many writes. I just boot to MacOS when I want to change it permanently... but otherwise I can change settings in ffado-mixer fine, they just won't persist if I power off the Audiofire. I have a Linux/hackintosh PC so MacOS works well for doing this. If you don't have MacOS maybe you can use Windows in a VM and install the Echo Audio firewire console for Windows instead. Or it might even work on wine... I was actually thinking of trying that so I don't have to reboot.
Well, I ran the audiofire driver exe on wine and installed it, but the console doesn't work. I think this is because on Windows it has to install actual drivers while on MacOS there are no drivers, it just works. I also looked into using Virtualbox but there's no hope there... I guess there's no passthrough for firewire ports like there is for USB.
Maybe there's some way to get this to work from Linux... but it's probably going to be a struggle. Probably best to just boot into another OS to set everything up and save it to flash and then never worry about it again.
And like I said, if someone can figure out what commands to send ffado-dbus-server to change the buttons and sliders in ffado-mixer from a script, the flash memory feature would become irrelevant. I still want to try to figure that out just for the extra convenience it would provide.
And like I said, if someone can figure out what commands to send ffado-dbus-server to change the buttons and sliders in ffado-mixer from a script, the flash memory feature would become irrelevant. I still want to try to figure that out just for the extra convenience it would provide.
In theory we should be capable of gaining that knowledge by reverse engineering ffado mixer, right? The mixer features is nice, but i don't use stuff like that normally, with the usb interfaces i have, for me and interface just has level 0 and whatever i put it has to have proper gain anyways. Ardour will show all channels and gains, so there is absolutely nothing i miss, i would only want to have a script that runs when turn on the power to the interface, that sets all levels to 0. Does the software provide sub groups or something? That might a feature I'm interested in.
And like I said, if someone can figure out what commands to send ffado-dbus-server to change the buttons and sliders in ffado-mixer from a script, the flash memory feature would become irrelevant. I still want to try to figure that out just for the extra convenience it would provide.
In theory we should be capable of gaining that knowledge by reverse engineering ffado mixer, right? The mixer features is nice, but i don't use stuff like that normally, with the usb interfaces i have, for me and interface just has level 0 and whatever i put it has to have proper gain anyways. Ardour will show all channels and gains, so there is absolutely nothing i miss, i would only want to have a script that runs when turn on the power to the interface, that sets all levels to 0. Does the software provide sub groups or something? That might a feature I'm interested in.
If you want all the levels set to zero all the time, you can just set it once in another OS and save it to flash. The reason I change things with ffado-mixer is because I keep all the levels up and use the hardware monitoring. I know there's a setting in Ardour for it to use the device's hardware monitoring, which I would expect would override the mixer settings... but it doesn't work for me. Whenever I try to change monitoring setting in Ardour I either get no sound, or double sound... Unless I just don't use it and then use ffado-mixer to turn on monitoring. The reason I can't just keep it on all the time is because when I turn off all my synth gear, I get ground hum noise until I mute all the channels. And since the Audiofire is my main audio interface I can't simply turn it off when I'm doing other things. So what I want is to be able to unmute all channels or mute all channels with a script so I don't have to click all the buttons repeatedly in ffado-mixer.
Oh, awesome! Yes please... let us know how to do this. Good to see QEMU has firewire port passthrough.
Not specifically firewire passthrough, just PCIe passthrough, so you steal firewire controller for a moment from the OS to pass it through to another one.
And like I said, if someone can figure out what commands to send ffado-dbus-server to change the buttons and sliders in ffado-mixer from a script, the flash memory feature would become irrelevant. I still want to try to figure that out just for the extra convenience it would provide.
In theory we should be capable of gaining that knowledge by reverse engineering ffado mixer, right? The mixer features is nice, but i don't use stuff like that normally, with the usb interfaces i have, for me and interface just has level 0 and whatever i put it has to have proper gain anyways. Ardour will show all channels and gains, so there is absolutely nothing i miss, i would only want to have a script that runs when turn on the power to the interface, that sets all levels to 0. Does the software provide sub groups or something? That might a feature I'm interested in.
If you want all the levels set to zero all the time, you can just set it once in another OS and save it to flash. The reason I change things with ffado-mixer is because I keep all the levels up and use the hardware monitoring. I know there's a setting in Ardour for it to use the device's hardware monitoring, which I would expect would override the mixer settings... but it doesn't work for me. Whenever I try to change monitoring setting in Ardour I either get no sound, or double sound... Unless I just don't use it and then use ffado-mixer to turn on monitoring. The reason I can't just keep it on all the time is because when I turn off all my synth gear, I get ground hum noise until I mute all the channels. And since the Audiofire is my main audio interface I can't simply turn it off when I'm doing other things. So what I want is to be able to unmute all channels or mute all channels with a script so I don't have to click all the buttons repeatedly in ffado-mixer.
Do you use qpwgraph? It will show you the pipewire wiring going on, that might help to see what happens.
How do you use ffado with pipewire? What's your configuration?
which I tried, and that resulted in me having no audio at all. I'm not sure how to determine which driver I am using, alsa or ffado... because all qpwgraph shows me is that the devices are using pipewire. I have pipewire-ffado installed though.
Either way, my system works the way it is... so not sure if I should change anything.
Here's what my qpwgraph looks like while running Ardour: http://serqetry.net/qpwgraph.png
I have the same problem with pipewire-ffado, i tried that config. Had no time today and gave up on it for now. I will have a deeper look into it on Friday.
So we're both running using alsa. You can run lsmod on command line as root, if you see a snd_fireworks module, that's the case. Does ffado-mixer work for you while you're running like this? I can't seem to connect to the interface with it.
I also tried to access the alsamixer but it doesn't show me anything.
I have the same problem with pipewire-ffado, i tried that config. Had no time today and gave up on it for now. I will have a deeper look into it on Friday.
So we're both running using alsa. You can run lsmod on command line as root, if you see a snd_fireworks module, that's the case. Does ffado-mixer work for you while you're running like this? I can't seem to connect to the interface with it.
I also tried to access the alsamixer but it doesn't show me anything.
Ah ok. I was afraid of that. Yes I see snd_fireworks.
But yes, ffado-mixer works. It connects to the AudioFire and all the mixer controls work. The only things that don't work are the sample rate and clock source, as well as the save settings to flash ability... which I seriously doubt would work even if the ffado driver was being used by pipewire. Clock source setting doesn't matter to me, as it defaults to internal which is what I want, and sample rate can be changed by pipewire itself.
If you figure out how to get it to use ffado instead of alsa, that would be cool to see what, if any, improvements there are... but like I said, it seems to be working good enough for me the way it is. Maybe that hardware monitoring feature in Ardour would actually work with the ffado driver though... that might be nice.
Okay, i made a video, then tested stuff with the setup i presented and noticed that theres weird glitches and the clocks and streams are going async. I found out that you actually have to downgrade the firmware to 4.8. That was the last version of the software that worked with all the implementations on linux.
I'm now trying to get ffado running with pipewire and i am having first little successes after the firmware downgrade. Unfortunately the ffado pipewire module feels less than beta. Alsa / pipewire also does work, but the roundtrip through my comp takes like 111ms. That's not a huge issue, but i think there is a setup that goes faster. I'll have to experiment more. Specifically there is a way of installing jack underneath Pipewire and bridging both. So you could run all multimedia using pulse and Pipewire but it's not connected to alsa , but instead to ffado and jack.
Downgrade of the firmware is just installing the old console and driver in version 4.8, starting the console and updating the firmware in the usual spot in the about screen. It will tell you that it upgrades to the current latest version, which in case of the software is just 4.8. That's easily done on the windows box, with a bit of luck i could find a old version of the windows software bundle in 4.8. Specifically searching for the old file name helped.
Well none of that sounds too great. I'm wondering if it's even worth it to try to switch to FFADO. What is the advantage exactly over just sticking with Alsa? I haven't done a whole lot yet with Ardour, but so far I haven't run into any problems.
Also, I think if I downgrade my Audiofire firmware that low it won't work in MacOS anymore.
