ffado-mixer with Echo Audiofire12

[Psychotronic]

My understanding is that the Pipewire devs implemented the ffado module without testing it, because they don't have actual Firewire hardware to test on. I'm also unsure what benefit for the current setup a integration into Pipewire would bring.

Alsa works for me. Downgrading the interface will just get ffado mixer to work fully. I'm not sure it adds benefits to the alsa setup. Base Firewire will be part and actively supported on linux until 2029. Till then the market will for sure spit out a bunch of cheap and big usb interfaces via ebay, as soon as the next big thing has been invented and released. I hear that folks are all about avb right now. Give them a few years, it's gonna happen.

[wtay]

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.

I found this... https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... ssues/3558

Seems like a lot of people have issues getting FFADO to work with pipewire, and I'm not getting the feeling that the pipewire devs care all that much.

I would care if I actually had hardware to test... Maybe someone can send a patch? Otherwise, you have to wait... I have been sent a device that should arrive soon, If I can get a firewire setup working I'm sure I can get it to JACK level of performance eventually.

Wim

[Psychotronic]

I would care if I actually had hardware to test... Maybe someone can send a patch? Otherwise, you have to wait... I have been sent a device that should arrive soon, If I can get a firewire setup working I'm sure I can get it to JACK level of performance eventually.

Wim

If i can help testing and identifying problems, please feel free to ask. I'm a daytime "cloud tech" dev. So i know how to handle code, but i don't have skills in the driver level side of things. I can definitely try out patches you send me.

One thing i noticed on my system, with 4.8 installed. As I'm using Alsa/Pipewire and ffado-mixer, they both seem to do something to each other and to the accessibility of the PCIe card to qemu. I don't have the ffado module activated, so i don't think that plays a role here.

But what I'm doing is kinda handing around the Firewire device between ffado, Alsa/Pipewire and qemu. I'm sure that's not a good idea anyways, but it also has the side effect that it doesn't work in then end at some point anymore. I boot the computer and can start qemu, all is running. Shutting it qemu down and then using ffado-mixer works also, i can also put streams through the interface using alsa, all good. Then it takes a few minutes. (Not sure what exactly causes it, but the end effect is that ffado-mixer can't read settings anymore. When i then try to boot qemu, that also gets stuck and won't boot, i even cannot restart libvirtd, it's just stuck. Which is very likely a PCIe access or freeing up problem.

Streams on the other hand still work, i can use Pipewire - no issues. I only can't access any of the mixers anymore. Restarting Pipewire doesn't solve the situation. Maybe i can somehow force kill the Firewire kernel module. I'll fiddle around more with it. I also need to look through system logs still, maybe point at something, for you guys.

[Psychotronic]

Two things i found out that work better for me in the combination of tech here:

1. If ffado-mixer doesn't read the interfaces data anymore on start then the ffado-dbus-mixer is stuck or does something weird. Just "pkill ffado-dbus-serv" fixes the problem, I therefor wrapped ffado-mixer in a script that pkills the service beforehand.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

pkill ffado-dbus-serv
ffado-mixer

1. In combination of Pipewire and Alsa Fireworks, ardour crashes on export if you use pipewire-jack. Interestingly i got very good results with pipewire-pulse, so just switch to pulse-audio in Ardour for exporting. This happens only if i use non-realtime exporting.

These were my two main issues so far.

Oh, if something really gets messed up, restarting pipewire helps. -> systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse