Re: [linux-audio-user] Tascam US-122, Laptop and Keyboard

On Wednesday 23 March 2005 03:32, Steve Fosdick wrote:
> Frustrated that my laptop doesn't have line-in and that the mic-in is not
> very useful (unbalanced, no phantom power) I have finally invested in an
> external USB interface, the Tascam US-122.
> Unfortunately this doesn't appear to work with my laptop though it works
> mostly-ok with my desktop.

Mine works good with desktop and laptop. :-P

> The two applications I have tried to use are jack+ardour and the standard
> ALSA aplay. ALSA aplay does work for a while but can stall part way
> through playing and then never seems to recover eventually reporting I/O
> error.
> Jackd will sometimes run for a few seconds without error but soon starts
> reporting errors of the form:
> delay of 24606.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 23134.000; restart
> ... delay of 24779.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of 23134.000;
> restart ... delay of 24781.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare time of
> 23134.000; restart ... delay of 24741.000 usecs exceeds estimated spare
> time of 23134.000; restart ... jackd watchdog: timeout - killing jackd

Yeah, I got this too, sometime back.

> I have read the thread on this list "USX2Y rawusb mode" and have therefore
> already tried turning off ACPI and running with nrpacks=4. Turning off
> ACPI seemed to make little difference though it did change the interrupt
> assignments, while nrpacks=4 seems to have improved things slighly though
> not reliable enough to use. Changing the -p option seems to change the
> values of time reported above but that's about all. The problem is just
> the same for either 44100 or 48000 sample rate.

Did you set the jack-options according to nrpacks=4?
I once tried playing with this option but dropped it as it brought no
advantage for me.
Mine currently works with several different settings, I have attached my
qjackctlrc...

> I have tried kernels 2.6.10, 2.6.11, 2.6.11.4 and 2.6.11.5. The 2.6.11
> series seems to be closer to working. Anyone please have ideas of what to
> try next or what info I could gather than would be useful?

I am using 2.6.11 successfully...

> By comparison it works a treat on my desktop PC apart from one from little
> niggle (which also affects the laptop). Sometimes when unplugging the
> US-122 the keyboard on the PC locks up. At this point it is usually still
> possible to log in over the network and shut the PC down which is
> sometimes sucessful and sometimes it hangs somewhere in the shutdown
> sequence.

I get this error occasionally on my desktop-system. But as this has two
soundcards I don't need a third very often...

> >From my laptop, /proc/interrupts with ACPI on:
>
> CPU0
> 0: 26742183 XT-PIC timer
> 1: 7401 XT-PIC i8042
> 2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
> 5: 1148549 XT-PIC VIA686A, ohci1394, VIA82XX-MODEM
> 8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
> 9: 4 XT-PIC acpi
> 10: 1218664 XT-PIC eth0, uhci_hcd, uhci_hcd

This could be a problem, I would focus on splitting these up. (And perhaps
disable network while recording.)

Perhaps this helps...

Arnold

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