• Registered: 2015-01-29
  • Posts: 8

Topic: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

Can any of the experienced forum users please help? I have an AES-32 card which is recognised but not properly configured by the HDSPM driver on Ubuntu 14.10. Would different firmware or possibly adapting the code of the driver be sufficient to get the card working?  The AES-32 works flawlessly under Windows 7, driven by JRiver 20's JRSS parametric equaliser, but all my other PC uses have been based around Linux for the past 7 years or more. The AES-32 is detected by alsa -

john@Zalman:~$uname -r
3.16.0-29-generic
john@Zalman:~$uname -a
Linux Zalman 3.16.0-29-generic #39-Ubuntu SMP Mon Dec 15 22:27:29 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
john@Zalman:~$cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                      HDA NVidia at 0xfaffc000 irq 17
 1 [HDSPMxb1d3f8   ]: HDSPM - RME AES32_b1d3f8
                      RME AES32 S/N 0xb1d3f8 at 0xfb8f0000, irq 18
 2 [D2             ]: AV200 - Xonar D2
                      Asus Virtuoso 200 at 0xac00, irq 19
 3 [UAC2           ]: USB-Audio - hiFaceTWO UAC2
                      M2Tech hiFaceTWO UAC2 at usb-0000:07:00.0-2, high speed

HDSPConf however cannot find the card:

john@Zalman:~$ hdpsconf
HDSPConf 1.4 - Copyright (C) 2003 Thomas Charbonnel <thomas@undata.org>
This program comes WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTYHDSPConf is free software, see the file copying for details

Looking for HDSP cards :
Card 0 : HDA NVidia at 0xfaffc000 irq 17
Card 1 : RME AES32 S/N 0xb1d3f8 at 0xfb8f0000, irq 18
Card 2 : Asus Virtuoso 200 at 0xac00, irq 19
Card 3 : M2Tech hiFaceTWO UAC2 at usb-0000:07:00.0-2, high speed
No Hammerfall DSP card found.

HDSPMixer runs, and the sliders operate, but nothing else. JRiver mediacenter20 lists the card but will not play to it, and I cannot start jack either. I'm an experienced, retired engineer (digital sonar systems), and I fully understand RME's commercial position, BTW, and would be prepared to have a look at changing the code if that's what it needs. Many thanks.

  • tino
  • New member
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  • Registered: 2012-11-20
  • Posts: 4

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

Hi,

I'm also struggling with a AES32 card. I can't even get mono or stereo PCM playback to work. The output sounds as if some parts of audio data are skipped. The level meters in hdspmixer are _all_ moving with mono playback, and 5 meters are moving with stereo playback, which seems odd.

  • Registered: 2015-01-29
  • Posts: 8

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

Tino,
you are further on than I - the distro version of hdspconf (in alsa-tools-1.0.28) failed at the initialisation step - it looked as if support for AES32 had been removed from the code.  Can you say which version of firmware your board has, and which version of alsa-tools you are running?

I have modified and re-compiled hdspconf. It now passes the first step of initialisation and opens the mixer matrix, but I anticipate a lot more work before I can make it work properly. The card is now working so well in Windows that I'm seriously considering moving everything that I want to use the RME card for (audio/video playback with digital crossover implemented in JRiver) onto a dedicated Windows box that I will have to buy and build.

It's frustrating that the manufacturer sees Linux as a niche market. Other companies like Focusrite have actually given away free hardware to the open source community to help in developing drivers. I know this card will go in the bin just as soon as a reasonably priced competitor appears.

  • Registered: 2015-06-29
  • Posts: 1

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

tino wrote:

Hi,

I'm also struggling with a AES32 card. I can't even get mono or stereo PCM playback to work. The output sounds as if some parts of audio data are skipped. The level meters in hdspmixer are _all_ moving with mono playback, and 5 meters are moving with stereo playback, which seems odd.

I am using this card on Fedora (20 - legacy reasons) and was having this skipped samples problem. After a lot of time wasting it turned out that the default period_size and buffer_size are incorrect for the channel interleaving.

We now have the card working really well for capture and playback of 5.1 audio using the configuration below. You can use the --period-size/--buffer-size options in arecord/aplay to experiment with what works for you. I needed to set these in a conf file since ffmpeg is used for capture and can't set the correct options on the command line.

Note that, in our use case, latency is not an issue so we haven't bothered tuning these parameters - we only care about getting no dropped samples.

Good luck!

pcm.capture {
  type dsnoop
  ipc_key 1024
  slave {
    channels 6
    pcm {
      format S32_LE
      rate 48000
      type hw
      card 0
      device 0
    }
    period_time 0
    period_size 2048
    buffer_size 4096
  }
  bindings {
    0 0
    1 1
    2 2
    3 3
    4 4
    5 5
  }
}

pcm.playback {
  type dmix
  ipc_key 1025
  slave {
    channels 6
    pcm {
      format S32_LE
      rate 48000
      type hw
      card 0
      device 0
    }
    period_time 0
    period_size 2048
    buffer_size 4096
  }
  bindings {
    0 0
    1 1
    2 2
    3 3
    4 4
    5 5
  }
}

pcm.hdspe_aes32 {
  type asym
  playback.pcm "playback"
  capture.pcm "capture"
}

  • Registered: 2015-01-29
  • Posts: 8

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

Many thanks to anonymouscoward for that post - I finally got round to replacing Windows 10 with Fedora, put the suggested configuration lines into /etc/alsa/alsactl.conf, and the AES32  is producing sound. (HDSPConf does not work, but that is less of a problem!). Does anyone know why the alsa driver works under Fedora, but not Ubuntu?

  • feen
  • New member
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  • Registered: 2015-11-18
  • Posts: 1

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

Adding these parameters to arecord fixed my problem recording from the AES channels under ubuntu.

Thanks a lot!

  • Registered: 2015-01-29
  • Posts: 8

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

Can anyone explain how to access/control the output sample frequency under Ubuntu 15.10? The card works correctly under Windows. Under Ubuntu the hdspm driver loads and hdpsmixer works, and the card produces sound,  but only 44.1 or 48 kHz are available. I'm using JRiver Media Center.

JRiver's alsacap program reports as follows:

john@Streacom:~$ /usr/lib/jriver/Media\ Center\ 21/alsacap
*** Scanning for playback devices ***
ALSA lib conf.c:3325:(snd_config_hooks_call) Cannot open shared library libasound_module_conf_pulse.so
ALSA lib control.c:954:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:0
Error opening control interface for card 0: Device does not exist.  Skipping.

Neither rmedigicontrol or hdspconf work because their code pre-dates the AES card - I have had some success with adding the necessary sections to the code for hdspconf in a previous attempt (under Fedora), but I feel that there must be a standard command line/alsa tools to identify the card's capabilities.

  • Registered: 2015-01-29
  • Posts: 8

Re: Help sought - AES32 card on Ubuntu 14.10

I've found a Linux compatible solution from Lynx, one of RME's competitors. RME's refusal to support Linux users has been a key factor in my decision to shift supplier - your loss of a well over E2000  purchase. My RME card will go on eBay, and I will be very unlikely to use an RME product again.