Re: [LAU] envy24 issues

From: Niels Mayer <nielsmayer@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Thu Sep 09 2010 - 08:38:51 EEST

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 1:40 AM, menno <nabob_cd@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> first of all, your redesigned version of Envy24 Control looks pleasing to the eye, thanks for this update!

Enjoy!

> I have a couple of questions that come to mind
>
> - i remember with the old version 0.6 i never succeeded in getting any signal from my DAT recorder using S/PDIF in. I must admit i haven't tried it with this version (1.03) - it takes a lot of physical effort from my part to make a connection with cables due to too many hardware fighting for space, but did you do any work in that area as well? Is it worth the try?

It is certainly worth a try! And I didn't need to do anything to make
digital input/mixing/routing work in mudita24. I have all three, and
soon four ( just won
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290470230872
Terratec EWS88D ADAT/SPDIF card for $19.99!) ice1712-based cards all
of which have excellent digital I/O sections. The digital I/O and
ability to use the onboard mixer to send audio to/from external
effects makes it easy to get a "digital channel" insert wherever you
need it, or get SPDIF from a sampler, or audio from my other computer
(i've jury rigged a sort-of digital matrix router out of radio-shack
passive video switches)... anyways the SPDIF or AES/EBU digital I/O
works well and its integration and routing flexibility is one of the
strong points of the sound card.

With the DAT recorder, just be sure to have the card running at 48K,
or even better, set it up to get sync from the spdif input.

> - looking at the tab Hardware Settings i see a message : IEC958 Input Status, unable to read IEC958 Input Status: No such file or directory
> What does it need? What can i do?

This looks like http://code.google.com/p/mudita24/issues/detail?id=2 .
This is an Audiophile 2496 handling bug in Mudita24, but it should
work fine even with the error message displayed. Unfortunately, it
also means the Audiophile 2496 doesn't support the "delta input
status". However, if this value can't be retrieved, it doesn't mean
your card doesn't have a working digital input.

For one, unless the card happens to be running at more or less the
same frequency as the digital input you won't see any signal on the
input. Such non-locked "free wheeling" synchronization is far from
ideal, but in practice, I don't hear any desyncing or noise when doing
this with M-audio "Delta" cards (not sure about how Audiophile 2496
performs in this context). These allow digital inputs to be active
from an externally clocked source, even while the card is internally
clocked -- as long as the rates are the same. Other cards, like the
terratec dmx6fire, won't see any input from SPDIF unless the card is
eternally clocked sync'd from SPDIF. It is possible the Audiophile
2496 acts more like the dmx6fire and requires the card be externally
clocked if the digital input is being used.

> is it possible to scale the mixer to other dimensions? i would like to have
>the mixer in sight all the time while doing my work but it would be nicer to be able to resize
>it to smaller proportions and still seeing all the levels.

I agree that this would be a good feature -- some kind of compact
mode, perhaps just showing the meters, as well as a more interactive
mode with sliders and buttons. (Pls make a feature request at
http://code.google.com/p/mudita24/issues/entry .)

Tim E. Real made a patch to mudita24 that uses different sliders for
the mixer, and thus the mixer meters and sliders can be resized.
Unfortunately, it can't be made much shorter than 385 pixels. Perhaps
Tim can tell us whether his rework of the sliders have the potential
of displaying any smaller than that. However, the minimum sizing might
still be determined by the layout of the "profiles" or
"patchbay/router" panels, both of which are quite tall.
Patchbay/router could potentially be shrunk a bit by getting rid of
extra vertical whitespace in the larger sized "digital mix" and "pcm
out" rows and just use the horizontal-separators to make them visually
distinctive.

If you want to try out TIm's changes, the patch is here ...
http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2010/08/0059.html ; I'm awaiting the
rest of Tim's changes and then hope to release mudita1.04 when they're
ready. (Tim, status??)

-- Niels
http://nielsmayer.com

PS: My response/accept of
http://code.google.com/p/mudita24/issues/detail?id=2#c1
//////////////////
Looks like I made a mistake in adding the Audiophile 2496 to the set
of M-Audio cards that support the "Delta IEC958 input status" display.
Which means this field will not be displayed at all once the issue is
fixed, when using an Audiophile 2496. The cards that will support this
feature will then be

        if ((card_eeprom.subvendor == ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTA1010
          || card_eeprom.subvendor == ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTA1010LT
          || card_eeprom.subvendor == ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTA66
          || card_eeprom.subvendor == ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTADIO2496
          || card_eeprom.subvendor == ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTA410))

Note that this value can be tested with
amixer -c M66 cget iface=MIXER,name='Delta IEC958 Input Status'
numid=50,iface=MIXER,name='Delta IEC958 Input Status'
  ; type=BOOLEAN,access=r-------,values=1
  : values=off

Hopefully ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTADIO2496 and
ICE1712_SUBDEVICE_DELTA410 as "Delta" cards, will support this
supposedly delta-specific feature. I do not have those cards to test
against, and they're probably quite rare and hard to find.
////////////////////

PPS: If anybody has a Delta410 or DeltaDio2496, please send me the output of
"amixer cget iface=MIXER,name='Delta IEC958 Input Status'"
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@email-addr-hidden
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
Received on Thu Sep 9 12:15:01 2010

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Sep 09 2010 - 12:15:02 EEST