[linux-audio-user] FA-66, slackware, freebob, thinkpad R40 - cracks on recordings

Hello from Prague,
I bought the firewire soundcard Edirol FA-66. Yesterday morning I
compiled freebob, recompiled jack and within half an hour I already saw
all 6 inputs and outputs in qjackctl. What? Recording on linux is hard?
Pha! I thought but unfortunately my moment of victory didn't last long.
On all recordings there is a strange cracking sound, not all the time,
but every couple of seconds. No xruns though. Before I bought this
device I used to record through the internal soundcard of my thinkpad
R40, running all programs as root and this 'sort of' worked. So I
thought I should first of all make sure all my apps can run as user.
After a lot of reading (I spent all day on this yesterday before I
decided to consult this list) I figured the best approach for me would
be to use set_rlimits, because slackware doesn't have PAM, and I never
patched a kernel before. As I understand these are the 3 possibilities
for programs to run in realtime right? Well, in short I can now run
qjackctl, jack and ardour as user without xruns, but this weird cracking
is still on the recordings. To make sure it was not an ardour issue I
tried sooperlooper, and the noise is still there. I suspect the trouble
is probably freebob, because I didn't have this issue before and maybe I
should have written on their list, but I am not completely sure and I
found very useful information here before, so here I am, asking for any
advice, because I don't know what to do anymore. Here is some more
information about my setup>

Thinkpad R40, Pentium4, 512MbRAM
Slackware 10.2
uname -r 2.6.13

jackd version 0.102.20 tmpdir /tmp protocol 16

Ardour/GTK 0.99.3
  (built using 1.4.1 with libardour 0.908.2 and GCC version 3.3.6)

Gscanbus - Edirol
SelfID Info
-----------
Physical ID: 0
Link active: Yes
Gap Count: 63
PHY Speed: S400
PHY Delay: <=144ns
IRM Capable: Yes
Power Class: +15W
Port 0: Connected to parent node
Port 1: Not connected
Init. reset: Yes

CSR ROM Info
------------
GUID: 0x0040AB0000C33B81
Node Capabilities: 0x000083C0
Vendor ID: 0x000040AB
Unit Spec ID: 0x0000A02D
Unit SW Version: 0x00010001
Model ID: 0x00010049
Nr. Textual Leafes: 2

Vendor: ROLAND DG CORPORATION
Textual Leafes:
EDIROL
EDIROL FA-66

AV/C Subunits
-------------
Unknown: 1
Unknown: 1

Thank you in advance,
Best wishes

Martin Alaçam
Received on Tue Jan 30 16:15:02 2007