Using M-audio (USB) Fast Track Pro on linux

[Harry Putnam]

Running Debian Linux (Wheezy) 3.0.0-1-686-pae

Can anyone suggest pointers, urls, or coaching toward getting an
m-audio USB Fast Track Pro (external sound card) working?

When I run `alsamixer' it lists the Fast Track as one of the sound
cards available. When I choose it, alsamixer reports there are no
controls available

(`This sound device does not have any controls')

All the controls are on the device. I have the speakers turned on, the
Fast Track light is on, indicating it is getting power thru the usb
port.

However, when I attempt tp play something with `mplayer some.wav', I
get no sound.

[Mike Rivers]

On 1/2/2012 9:48 AM, Harry Putnam wrote:

> Can anyone suggest pointers, urls, or coaching toward getting an
> m-audio USB Fast Track Pro (external sound card) working?

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-MAudio

It's supported, but it's up to you to wade through the ALSA
Project documentation, figure out what you need, how to
install it, and then what it can and can't do. Everyone who
doesn't need it says there's plenty of support for audio
hardware under Linux, but whatever you have, nobody else has
it, so you've always got to figure these things out by
yourself.

I gave up on Linux for audio except when I feel like wasting
a lot of time not getting anything useful accomplished. You
may eventually come around to recognizing that it's (still)
the state of the art. I have never had success getting any
audio device other than the computer's built in sound card
working under Linux. But there are lots of people out there
who will tell you that "lots of devices are fully
supported." At least your Fast Track Pro is on the list.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.




--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Harry Putnam]

Mike Rivers <mri...@d-and-d.com> writes:

> On 1/2/2012 9:48 AM, Harry Putnam wrote:
>
>> Can anyone suggest pointers, urls, or coaching toward getting an
>> m-audio USB Fast Track Pro (external sound card) working?
>
> http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-MAudio

[...]

> Good luck. Let us know how it goes.

It wasn't too bad... most distros have the alsa stuff as a kernel
option.

All I really needed was to find the actual device names linux gave to
Fast track Pro like this:

(aplay is in a package called alsa-utils)

aplay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: ICH5 [Intel ICH5], device 0: Intel ICH [Intel ICH5]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: ICH5 [Intel ICH5], device 4: Intel ICH - IEC958 [Intel ICH5 - IEC958]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Pro [FastTrack Pro], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Pro [FastTrack Pro], device 1: USB Audio [USB Audio #1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0


Then test the card and devices shown in by telling mplayer to try to
use them one at a time:

For mplayer you show card and device like device=hw=card.device
so using the output above it would be device=hw=1.0
or device=hw=1.1

So:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 some.wav

The first one hw=1.0 worked... hw=1.1 does not work... it may be for
recording or something... I'm not sure.

[philicorda]

On Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:15:30 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote:


> The first one hw=1.0 worked... hw=1.1 does not work... it may be for
> recording or something... I'm not sure.

I think 1.1 will be the SPDIF output on the sound card.

[Harry Putnam]

Thanks for that bit... just curious though, what makes you say that?

[philicorda]

With 'hw=1.0' the first number is the sound card, and the second the
device on the sound card. Each device can have a number of sub-devices,
which are the actual physical outputs.

For example, my computer has two soundcards. An onboard intel ALC
horrible thing (hw=0) and a Gina20 (hw=1).

It looks like this:
$cat /proc/asound/pcm

00-00: ALC883 Analog : ALC883 Analog : playback 1 : capture 1
00-01: ALC883 Digital : ALC883 Digital : playback 1 : capture 1
00-02: ALC883 Analog : ALC883 Analog : capture 1
01-00: Analog PCM : Gina20 : playback 8 : capture 2
01-01: Digital PCM : Gina20 : playback 2 : capture 2

The Gina20 (card 1, device 0)(ANALOG OUTS) looks like this:

$ cat /proc/asound/card1/pcm0p/info
card: 1
device: 0
subdevice: 0
stream: PLAYBACK
id: Analog PCM
name: Gina20
subname: subdevice #0
class: 0
subclass: 0
subdevices_count: 8
subdevices_avail: 8

The Gina20 (card 1, device 1)(SPDIF OUTS) looks like this:

$ cat /proc/asound/card1/pcm1p/info
card: 1
device: 1
subdevice: 0
stream: PLAYBACK
id: Digital PCM
name: Gina20
subname: subdevice #0
class: 0
subclass: 0
subdevices_count: 2
subdevices_avail: 2


So, the first Gina20 device (1.0) has 8 sub-devices, and corresponds to
the eight analog audio outs.
The second Gina20 device (1.1) has 2 sub-devices, and corresponds to the
stereo SPDIF outputs.

SPDIF connections are treated as their own device as they have some
unique properties (emphasis, clocking etc) compared to the analog outs.

Really though, you should not be addressing the 'hw:0' stuff directly.
It's better to do all this using a GUI interface and sound servers,
unless you are troubleshooting something. One of the reasons for this is
that the sound card order (which soundcard is hw:0 or hw:1) is *not
fixed* and will change depending on the order you plug the cards in. The
other reason is that if a sound card has no digital gain controls, then
ALSA will not show any. The desktop sound servers will insert software
gain controls.

To summarise: Avoid all the above. For general Linux audio it's easier to
right-click on the little speaker icon on the desktop and select a sound
card than to mess with ALSA. :)

If you are doing music recording though, it is nice to be sure there is
no unnecessary latency, sample rate conversion or software mixing/gain
controls in the audio path. This is where Jack comes in.

[Harry Putnam]

philicorda <phili...@dontspamme.com> writes:

First off, thanks for the detailed input.

[...]

> To summarise: Avoid all the above. For general Linux audio it's easier to
> right-click on the little speaker icon on the desktop and select a sound
> card than to mess with ALSA. :)

What little speaker icon.... hehe. You must have something installed
I do not.

I'm running debian wheezy and kde and have kmix installed but when I
click it from the start menu, it just bounces a while then goes
away... I never see an interface

> If you are doing music recording though, it is nice to be sure there is
> no unnecessary latency, sample rate conversion or software mixing/gain
> controls in the audio path. This is where Jack comes in.

I've seen mention of jack and did a little investigating... but its
not so easy seeing what should actually be installed, or if it would
have any bearing on sorting out the sound cards.

I can make mplayer work with m-audio Fast Track but only by specifying
the device.

So, if I play something from web page, it does not work, seems it
needs to be set globally somehow.

[Mike Rivers]

On 1/6/2012 2:43 PM, Harry Putnam wrote:

> I've seen mention of jack and did a little investigating... but its
> not so easy seeing what should actually be installed, or if it would
> have any bearing on sorting out the sound cards.

As far as a music player goes, you don't need jack
(literally and figuratively). Jack is kind of like a
patchbay for routing inputs to channels when you have a
multi-I/O interface.

There's a graphical control panel called qjackctl that helps
to make a little sense out of it. That may or may not be
installed on your system. If you want to use the computer
for audio and don't have any compelling reason for running
the Linux distribution that you're running now, you might
want to try the Ubuntu Studio distribution. When I was
messing around with this stuff, that was the one that came
closest to having everything that you need for audio already
installed, including the ALSA audio driver set.

[philicorda]

On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:43:33 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote:

> philicorda <phili...@dontspamme.com> writes:
>
> First off, thanks for the detailed input.
>
> [...]
>
>> To summarise: Avoid all the above. For general Linux audio it's easier
>> to right-click on the little speaker icon on the desktop and select a
>> sound card than to mess with ALSA. :)
>
> What little speaker icon.... hehe. You must have something installed I
> do not.
>
> I'm running debian wheezy and kde and have kmix installed but when I
> click it from the start menu, it just bounces a while then goes away...
> I never see an interface

I'm running Ubuntu. They have put a huge amount of work into making
desktop Linux more user friendly. I used to enjoy doing it myself with
Linux, but I can't be bothered any more.

You can configure Debian wheezy the same way (Ubuntu is based on Debian
after all), but you will have to work it out yourself. Installing the
Phonon server would be a good place to start.

>
>> If you are doing music recording though, it is nice to be sure there is
>> no unnecessary latency, sample rate conversion or software mixing/gain
>> controls in the audio path. This is where Jack comes in.
>
> I've seen mention of jack and did a little investigating... but its not
> so easy seeing what should actually be installed, or if it would have
> any bearing on sorting out the sound cards.

Jack is a sound server. It sits between audio programs and the ALSA
drivers.

What's nice about it is that means audio programs can talk to each other,
and the sound card. It only works with programs that support Jack, but
that is now the majority of audio programs worth using on Linux. It could
be seen as a combination of ASIO+Rewire on Windows or Mac.

To use it, install Jackd, and a Jack compatible program like Ardour.
Start jackd from the command line, or using QjackCtl, then start Ardour.

Ubuntu has these programs in the repository. They might be in Debian too.

Jack is really just for music. It solves a lot of problems on Linux when
recording audio, but makes some assumptions that make it less useful for
browsing YouTube etc at the same time.