Re: [Freebob-devel] [linux-audio-user] Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 I/O

From: Richard Taylor <rsjtaylor@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Thu Oct 26 2006 - 18:18:24 EEST

> There might be a chance that the device remembers the last mixer setting
> on startup. So you what you can try is setting the mixer on a windows
> machine (if you have one available) and see if it's settings are
> retained on power cycles.

I don't think it does as I generally have monitoring turned off in
windows and have been flitting between that and linux throughout my
experements. I'll double-check when I'm back at home. I'll also mess
with the standalone mode setting as i think one of those does remember
the last configuration, so there's a vague chance that it will also
mess with the defaults in non-standalone mode.

> The other option is to wait until we finish
> the mixer control. I know that the current code already contains most of
> the infrastructure to support this, but it's not finished. The
> difficulty (and opportunity) is that the interface is the same for all
> bebob devices, requiring it to be very flexible and hence pretty
> complicated. Daniel is the expert on this, maybe he can shed a light
> here. Maybe it's not very complicated to have a temporary tool that
> kills all zero-latency monitoring paths.

Exciting news about the freebob mixer stuff, I hadn't realised this
was allready well under way. Will keep my eyes peeled.

Additional good news, bad news - Phantom power is not switchable from
the front panel unless you are in standalone mode. Once the unit has
gone into this mode you can't boot jack until you power cycle the
saffire, which switches the phantom power off.
Pretty bad news as I imagine phantom power switching is a focusrite
not a bebob feature so freebob is unlikely to support it (correct me
if i'm wrong)
Good news is that the focusrite tech support people were quite
understanding and agreed to forward my concerns to their dev team to
see if they could get some sort of solution worked out. No promises of
course, but i was pleasantly surprised to see that they appeared open
to the idea, and it was nice to encounter tech support that not only
reads emails but responds to them intelligently.

Had a brief flutter with smaller latencies last night, seemed to be
pretty stable in realtime mode. The only xrun i got was when i was
booting SuperCollider's server, however I *really* knew about it, very
loud, fairly long noise burst. The saffire has an assignable volume
control which isn't assigned to anything by default so it came out as
full scale nastiness. Thankfully i have the sensitivity of my monitors
tuned down as far as they go or i could have been collecting my
tweeters from the opposite side of the room. Serves me right really,
it was a bit idiotic to have them connected when testing something
like this, but just thought I'd warn everyone else. My girlfriend
heard the burst and thought I'd electricuted myself.. :)

Front panel headphone controls work so you can safely test via these
without ear damage.

Anyway, i digress - I didn't tax my computer that much and only went
down to 128 samples/period, but i'm pretty optomistic on the latency
front.

Still not tried any of the digital gubbins yet - that's my next stop..
Received on Thu Oct 26 20:15:07 2006

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