R: Audio issues in 10.04

[Mike Holstein]

On Sep 17, 2012 8:13 AM, "brian.collins at alice.it" <brian.collins at alice.it>
wrote:
>
>
>>
>> Message: 2
>> Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:52:51 +0200
>> From: Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum at orgis.org>
>> To: Ubuntu Studio Users Help and Discussion
>> <ubuntu-studio-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
>> Subject: Horrific jackd xrun behaviour after upgrade from US 10.04 to
>> 12.04
>> Message-ID: <20120917105251.1214a1c9 at orgis.org>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> the subject says it all ... I had an install of 10.04 that worked. Only
>> issue seemed to be instability when recording while a USB drive is
>> connected. So, considering that perhaps this is a sign to replace a
>> mainboard with broken onboard USB (used a PCI add-on card, which might
>> have worsened the interrupt situation), I did replace it and the
>> machine worked fine during a session.
>>
>> Now with the fully replaced hardware (Asus AM3 board with 780G chipset,
>> Athlon || X3 460, 8 Gig of Kingston DDR3 ValueRAM, 250 G Seagate SATA
>> boot, 2 WD EADS on mdraid for recordings and not to forget VIA firewire
>> on PCI-E (same card as before)) and the update to ubuntu 12.04 (yes,
>> should have tested the final hardware with 10.04 first, eh?), the
>> performance is hindered by jackd not being able to keep steady without
>> generating xruns at a some rate. Not really constant rate, though, also
>> its behaviour depends on client connections (even when just connecting
>> meterbridge, this seems to help triggering xruns a lot).
>>
>> A very interesting fact is that using 3x512 periods (or bigger) is less
>> stable even than going down to 3x32! With big periods, I get xruns
>> right away, while with the low setting, I was able to get an hour of
>> recording done, but that ended prematurely -- I _guess_ that this was
>> because of some software glitch (like xrun handling) and not due to the
>> bass player nudging the keyboard by chance. But I cannot be sure about
>> that.
>>
>> Now, I do have the lowlatency kernel already installed, also fresh
>> jack/ardour from kxstudio ... have rtirq setup updated by dpkg
>> (firewire in there instead of ohci1394). What are the ubuntu studio
>> folks' thoughts on this? Did you encounter _more_ stable jack with
>> extremely low latencies? But since it is not really stable and
>> glitch-free in any config, this interesting characteristic does not
>> help. Oh, and it happens independent of cpufreq governor. I do use XFCE
>> and the integrated radeon with open source driver.
>>
>> Any help on getting that setup stable again is appreciated ... or
>> should I simply go back to 10.04 (and hand-install current ardour/jack,
>> as I did before)? I figure that I shouldn't even need a lowlat kernel
>> for getting basic 3x512 recording work!
>>
>>
>> Alrighty then,
>>
>> Thomas.
>>
>>
>> PS: Why upgrade at all? Well, I have always a spark of hope that some
>> iteration of the GNU/Linux audio ecosystem will be really stable,
>> without random crashes of Ardour, for example. But I guess one has to
>> live with crashing multimedia apps ... not been that different during
>> my days doing video with Ulead Media Studio on Windows (and the fact
>> that version 5 was less usable than 2.5).
If I thought it was the upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 that is the issue, I
would try a 12.04 live cd and see how it works with the usb device. I
typically use the live cd's as a tool to see hoe the hardware support is,
which is, as I see it, the issue you have. I still use ubuntustuio 10.04 in
my studio with a firewire device and it is rock solid. Tests of 12.04 and
12.10 only show improvment. i installed jack on my netbook running 12.04
and a generic kernel and JACK runs stable.

if that were my system, i would also try the internal sound card for
troubleshooting purposes. i think you'll find a scenario where with good
quality, and well supported hardware JACK will run stable, and checking in
with what version of ardour you are running and upgrading should fix any
stability issues with it.

i also have one odd tascam USB device that when running under ubuntu 10.04
actually has much worse performance with the realtime kernel. the best
support for it is with a generic kernel from the ubuntu repos.

ALSO, i use the kxstudio ppa's a lot, and quite like them, and the
developer is great. i would not suggest using KXstudio to try and add
support or increase the stability of a device that cannot be supported
well, or has misconfigured interrupts. i would use KXstudio to add newer or
different packages to ubuntu or ubuntustudio... not to magically repair an
xrun issue...

i assure you, in my test, JACK *is* quite stable, and setting up and
configuring USB devices can challenging.

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> Hello Thomas,
> I use KXStudio on top of UbuntuStudio, but the 12.04 version. I haven't
had any of the problems you mentioned at all.
> You might want to post your question on linuxmusicians forum here:
http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=8012
> I think you'll get more specific help with KXStudio there..
>
> brian
>
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