On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 9:56 AM, Daniel Mack zonque@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Aurélien,

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Aurélien Leblond blablack@gmail.com wrote:

...

I saw on the mailing that you a Felix have been doing a great deal of work to provide better support for the M-Audio FastTrack Ultra. I tested yesterday the new patch that provides mixer and the possibility to change the internal routing of the soundcard... I can finally use all the input/output to use external FX, that's very handy!

Anyway, on the M-Audio forum, Felix has been mentionning several times that there were few bugs that needed to be fixed with this soundcard, but that you needed to get your hand on one device to fix them (and may be even improve things around its support in general).

Quite frankly, I'm not fully aware about known issues with these devices that need attention. Could you summarize which problems are left to look at?

...

As M-Audio generously denied providing you with one (haaaa, these big corporations), I'm ok getting a brand new one sent to you. That would be part of my donation to the open-source community!

Wow, that's quite an offer, I'm impressed. However, I would really only need a device during development to hook it up to an USB analyzer and have a look at the dumps. And having access to one would definitely speed up development. Once the issues are fixed, though, I can give it back to you or to someone else who actually uses the device afterwards - I've got enough sound interfaces around here  :)

Plus .. it might take me awhile until I can actually start debugging this, as I'm drowning in work.

...

So the question really is...How would we organise that?

I'll send you my postal address in PM.

Thanks, Daniel

There are still the issue of samples dropping.

Tto reproduce it: - Open Audacity and set it up to be using Jack. - Click Generate -> Tone -> Ok.

"Normally" you should hear very regular pops...

Hi Daniel,

(just to have it public on the list)

Am 14.06.2011 10:56, schrieb Daniel Mack:

Quite frankly, I'm not fully aware about known issues with these devices that need attention. Could you summarize which problems are left to look at?

Here's a list of the issues I'm aware of:

1. Playback clicks:

There are periodic clicks in the playback at all sample rates. They are not very noticable in normal use but when you playback a plain sine the clicks are very obvious. When we discussed it last year we suspected that the device uses "implicit feedback". For the record: When we used the device with QUIRK_AUDIO_STANDARD_INTERFACE quirks we had clickless playback at 48 kHz and 96 kHz, but playback at 44.1 kHz and 88.2 kHz was totally distorted and the kernel would eventually crash after a minute or so.

2. External clock sync

The FTU devices are capable of syncing to an external clock via SPDIF. I don't know how to switch between internal and external clock. I don't even have a second audio interface to test with.

3. Mixer control steps:

The mixer controls are working fine now but are very fine grained. Being that fine grained it is hard to control the mixer in some mixer programs like alsamixer (alsamixer-qt4 and gamix work fine). A little bit of fine tuning would be nice. But I don't know which step size the hardware actually supports.

4. Reverb unit:

The FTU devices have a reverb unit which isn't supported, yet. It's straight forward based on the basic mixer support . I've almost got it wroking except for the "Reverb Program" switch. I know how to do it, so probably there will be a patch soon.

5. "Lost" URBs:

Some users reported occasional playback distortion combined with dmesg output like this: "ALSA urb.c:480: frame 5 active: -18". I don't know if this is really related to the driver. Actually I don't think so but who knows ...

Are there any other issues?

Kind regards,

Felix

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Aurélien Leblond blablack@gmail.com wrote:

...

Are there any other issues?

Felix

I don't know how related to the Alsa Driver and the FTU that problem is, nor if it has any impact, but dmesg still reports the following to me when I plug the FTU, even with the latest git driver.

[ 1846.736062] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4 [ 1846.869790] usb 2-1: config 1 interface 3 altsetting 0 bulk endpoint 0x7 has invalid maxpacket 8 [ 1846.869802] usb 2-1: config 1 interface 3 altsetting 0 bulk endpoint 0x87 has invalid maxpacket 8

That is a warning about bogus USB descriptors, and there's nothing the usb audio driver can do about them.

@Daniel: You had some doubt about you having the time to work on these issues or even the need of getting your hands on the FTU. Can you confirm it now? If so, I'll get it shipped to you this evening and you can expect to receive it in the next few days. If you would prefer to wait, let me know.... Your call!

Send it out, and I will care as soon as I can :)

Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Could you just confirm you received the soundcard? Just want to be sure it's not lost in space!

Thanks in advance, Aurélien