Konnekt24d - Linux. (Page 1 of 2)

Hello Paradox,

Im fighting with it such a long time...
I have a konnekt 24 D and would love to record my projects on linux.
So, i've installed Ubuntu9.10 and ffado-trunk. But what about the JACK ? Have you experienced any problems ?

Hope u can help me,

Peace, love and music.

I just reinstalled Ubuntu Karmic 9.10, 32bit edition, so I can take you through all the steps I did, with the fresh install.

1. I personalised my desktop, by going into System/Settings/Appearances(?) (I'm not sure how it translates, I have the norwegian desktop here.)

I chose NewWave theme, and the desert picture as background. You may ofcourse choose something else.

2. I added four, instead of two workspaces, by rightclicking the workspaces, and "user selection" (?). I also added Systemmonitor, in the upper bar, and changed it to display, ram, hd, cpu, net.

3. I opened a terminal, and did "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa" to add nvidia, to my repositories of updates.

4. I downloaded updates. I rebooted. I went to the update mananger, and installed som nvidia updates. I checked nvidias own site, and the current non-beta version, which is 190.53. I went to Synaptic, and installed nvidia-glx-190. I rebooted. I activated the driver in "hardware drivers". I rebooted. Unfortunately it seems to be a bit of rebooting, with the nvidia drivers. Notice the fans of the nvidia card, spinning down on reboot. Very nice. The nvidia fans are so powerful, they're chilling down the whole livingroom here, while they are going. This is the G-something 250 model.

5. Ofcourse you can just skip to these steps, which deals with audio onwards.
- Then I opened up a terminal. And did the following commands.

cd /home/uwaysi                             ## (Exchange Uwaysi for your username.)
mkdir Sourcecode
cd Sourcecode
sudo apt-get build-dep libffado             ## from http://subversion.ffado.org/wiki/Dependencies/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install build-essential libavc1394-dev python-qt4-dev subversion libtool
svn checkout http://subversion.ffado.org/ffado/trunk ffado-svn ## from http://subversion.ffado.org/wiki/DownloadFfadoSource
cd ffado-svn
cd libffado
scons PREFIX=/usr DEBUG=False BUILD_TESTS=False ENABLE_OPTIMIZATIONS=True ENABLE_FIREWORKS=False ENABLE_MOTU=False ENABLE_DICE=True ## from http://forum.tcelectronic.com/viewtopic.php?id=4236 Peace!
sudo scons install
cd ..
cd ..
svn co http://subversion.jackaudio.org/jack/trunk/jack jack
cd jack
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-default-tmpdir=/dev/shm
make
sudo make install

6. Then comes some step who require root control. "Sudo gnome-terminal", brings up a root terminal. PS: Dont use this for quick fixes, as it may ruin the ubuntu ways of doing things. Therefore we set up the user correctly.

echo 'KERNEL=="raw1394", GROUP="audio"' > /etc/udev/rules.d/raw1394.rules
udevadm control --reload-rules
rmmod raw1394
modprobe raw1394

7.Open up System/Administration/Users. Unlock it. Add yourself to audio.
gedit /etc/security/limits.conf

8. Copy and paste the following at the end of this file.
# grant real-time privileges to members of group "audio"
@audio  -       rtprio  99
@audio  -       memlock unlimited
@audio  -       nice    -10

9. Save. Log out, and back in.

I open up ffado-mixer, from Programs, Sound & Video. It seems to be working, reporting samplerate 48k, but the konnekt needed to be turned on before opening it, otherwise it would get stuck.

Hopefully jack will work aswell..
Open up console:
jackd -R -d firewire -n 4 -p 128
"Error (dice_eap.cpp)[ 112] init: Device does not support EAP" I think we can ignore this one.

It is time to check a jack-compliant application.
I have Renoise here, you may use your app.
I install Renoise 2.5rc1.
And Renoise is working with Jack, hurraayy!

This is all very well documented on the FFADO site.

You may also want to download http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net/
Install flash plugin also, if the browser asks.
Extract to the Sourcecode directory.
open console, cd to qjackctl-0.3.5
sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Now you can type qjackctl for some nice gui control of Jack, or go to programs/audio & video/qjackctl.

Here you can set rate (44.1k for me), and buffers, and driver to firewire. Frames 128 and periods 4, is a nice setting. And timeout can be set to 5000.

10. Getting output to jack, through pulseaudio.
AFAIK, there is not package for this yet, in the ubuntu repository, so I didn't bother, but it will be in Lucid, from what I have heard. So in a couple of months time, we can do system wide eq, and similar things, with jack.

11. I also did some further tweaks, like setting the nivida settings, to sync to vblank,  Images settings high quality, antialiasing 8x, anisotropic filtering 2x,  Digital Vibrance, 225.3. And saved these settings.
I also calibrated my monitor, according to a screenshot of Nvidias calibration pattern, from windows. You may want to adjust the digital vibrance, after doing this though. I also adjusted nautilus, (nautilus, from console), usersettings to show listview, and hidden files. Also set System/Settings/Appearances Visual effects, to extra.

And there you have it, The Linux Workstation, ready to baroque.

12. The perfectionist will want to compile his own kernel, with settings for multimedia, and probably turn off the swap file. www.kernelnewbies.org is a good place to start, for that. If your kernel isn't showing up when booting, try "sudo update-grub". There is also various patches, for low jitter performance, from various people, most known, is the realtime preemption patch from Ingo Molnar, and "BFS" scheduler, from Con Kolivas.

There may be information elsewhere, for further tuning aswell.

13. Installing my LADSPA plugins - Download from sourceforge.com/projcets/pxu, read the info contained in the archive.

Peace Be With You!
Uwaysi.

I decided to play some games though. Originally I thought I'd make this a music only machine, but I tried Quake Live, and it wasn't smooth in fullscreen, so I tweaked some more.
I recompiled a kernel with low-latency desktop setting, and a 300 timer.
This makes very low latency settings available aswell. I tested it with 1ms latency, and it worked well, apparently. However I think too low latency settings actually makes playing (keyboard) a bit stressful, so I'm staying at 4x128, or 11.6 ms latency. Alteast on headset. My genelecs feel better to play on with 12x16 buffers. (ca 5ms latency).

And some additional developer steps:

14. Enable linenumbering, and automatic tabs in gedit. Also turn off wordwrapping. Set it up in workspace 3 with nautilus on the left, and a console below.
(Makes a nice programming environment.)
15. Firefox in workspace 2 with social networking URLS..
16 Musicsoftware in workspace 4..
17 General workspace, in workspace 1.

This is so nice.

Peace Be With You.

Last edited by Paradox Uncreated (2010-03-03 00:06:50)

One ting, I also forgot, if firewire is not enabled in your menuconfig, go into firewire support section, and press "m" on each line there.

Peace Be With You.

This all sounds amazing!

How about vst plugs, is there anyplace to find out wich are working and which are not?

cheers.

When ill get time in a couple of weeks im going to give it a go. Have you switched completely to Linux now?

Btw, if you are recompiling a kernel, be sure to enable pre-emptive RCU.

Cheers, I've seen it aswell.

-PS: I contined tweaking the machine, and ended up changing the timer hz, to a much higher value, 3956. This can be done by editing src/kernel/config.hz I think it was, and search and replace 1000, with 3956. Very nice for low-jitter video, opengl.

There are steps to include all neccesary to build. So I don't know what has happened here.

There may be updated information over at the ffado site, check their info on the studio variant of Ubuntu.

Last edited by Paradox Uncreated (2010-12-05 12:28:14)

update.

in Maverick the raw1394 and associated legacy drivers are replaced with the new Juju modules.  see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FireWire

now trying to revert to legacy drivers and see if it works.  Still now sure why alsa is not detected during build..

After doing some work in win lately, I installed 2.6.38 kernel, and found that the old firewire stack is no longer there. I tried getting ffado to work, but wasn't succesful at first attempt. I'll let you know if I get it working. Or if anyone else on the list, has got it working, tell us if it's something particular we need to do.

Actually I got Natty working very well with low latencies here. 0.363ms, runs quite stable, I can browse the web and play renoise in the background, and it works fine. (without glitches.)
I had to turn off all kinds of features, I suspected added to latency in the kernel though. Such as choosing max preemption where possible, turning off iommus, (I dont have above 4GB ram anyway), slab allocator (slub does extra stuff, but is more resource efficient) turning off all debug and hacking stuff, security stuff. etc. - It uses quite a bit of cpu though, but it runs stable. I also had to modify rtprio to 99 and nice to -20, in /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf. I think that's about what I did. Really nice to be able to run such low latencies, when one wants. (Possibly where one has the extra cpu for it.)

My .config http://pastebin.com/JCie5RRN (notice that this is for my local config, but you can check a little what I turned off and on.)