recording interfaces

[mindwave]

hey guys. I just found out from the FL forums (and yes I'll pos there too) that with WINE I can run FL Studio under mandriva.

 

however the box that I use as my main pc, uses the built in sound card, which has no midid and would stink for recording anyway.

 

I bought an M-Audio 2496 for my 2007 version, but couldnt ever get it recognized, so I stuck it in my windows pc and everything works fione.

 

so now I'm looking for something to run in my MDV box and am wondering if anyone has any good recommendations for a mdv2008 setup?

 

The 2496 was only $100 and I'd love to stay in that range (especially since this is a like to not a have to), but then i wonder about the USB external interfaces like M-Audio's Fast Track USB.

 

anyone tried one of these in Mandriva?

 

has MDV fixed whatever the issue w/ the 2496 was (folks said I SHOULD have had NO issues with it, but after 6 months I gave up.

 

any and all ideas appreciated.

 

thanks

 

J

[scarecrow]

I do have an M-Audio 2496 on my Media Center PC, running Archlinux, and it's working great- including the MIDI interface.

The driver is just perfect, the latency with a mm-kernel very, very low, and the only complaint I've heard so far is that setting it up on some modern PCIE mainboards is somewhat tricky.

Can you give more hardware details?

 

Also- most M-Audio USB MIDI interfaces will work under Linux (I've done so with a cheap M-Audio Uno), but there things are much trickier- you need to build a specific loader and upload firmware to the interface to make it work.

Finally, I don't think that running FL Studio, or any demanding Audio application under wine is a bright idea. At best you will get latency times much worse than under native windows, or under VMWare (which is emulating just a cheap Soundblaster 16, which does not support ASIO natively). But running VMWare with an external USB interface might actually give good results- I must confess I've never tried it...

Edited March 28, 2008 by scarecrow

[mindwave]

hanks for the input, the more i look around the more i think i'll probably just buy another 2496, although i would love it if someone would tell me if 2008 works with it. maybe i'll burn a live cd and see what happens.

 

as far as the latencey goes, it really is more of a learning thing than an actual recording thing. i might do SOME mixing on it, but honestly my music pc sits 15 feet away on the other side of my office, surrounded by all my synths. this setup would be to see if it works, how well, and for occasional use. besides, Wine is cranking pretty well on my AMD X2 4800+ w/ 4GB of ram.

 

I think the USB thought was just because they are "newer and slicker" but I too have had issues with them working properly right out of the boc on MDV

[scarecrow]

Well, I do not use my 2496 with Manrdiva, but the driver it needs (snd-ice1712) is included in alsa since ages- so I fail to see why it shouldn't work...

If you plug the 2496 AFTER installing Linux, just go to runlevel 3 and run "alsaconf"- this will set the new card, and remove the modules from the old onboard card.

Also, handy is a GUI mixer for the 2496, which looks quite alike the windows mixer for that card (err, admittedly less pretty- it's based on gtk1...), which may appeal to you. It's named "envy24control" and it's included in the "alsa-utils" package.

For its money, and if two channels are enough for your needs, the 2496 is quite simply perfect.

Maybe only Echo Audio MiaMidi is better in that league, due to its balanced I/O's, but it costs some $70 more, and its MIDI interface isn't as good as the Delta Audiophile 2496 one...

Edited March 28, 2008 by scarecrow