M-Audio Fast Track Pro no input

I have a usb M-audio Fast Track Pro with Alsa installed on opensuse 11.4 (x86_64)
But I cannot record any mic with audacity.
qjackctl is showing no input capture?

Aren’t there any capture channels at all? I use a Hammerfall card which with the present set-up has 12 (system)capture channels, channels 11 and 12 is the analogue audio in to which I have connected a mixer. Channel 11 and 12 will in my set-up be connected to Audacity, i.e portaudio, to the writable channels within QJackCtl.

Audacity uses Portaudio and the input channels, in QJackCtl, will be displayed ‘portaudio’. Audacity has to be configured to use JACK and it has to be started: hit record, pause, connect and resume with your recording.

We need alsa because we want to let it work with oomidi-2012.
www.openoctave.org

There are no capture cards at all showing in qjackctl.
Tested it with audacity -alsa.

Is your record device listed from a terminal ? ie what do you see when you type as a regular user:


arecord --list-devices

card 0: Pro [FastTrack Pro], device 1: USB Audio [USB Audio #1]
Subdevices:1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

OK, so hw:0,1 is your record device. You should be able to use that information to record.

ie with arecord, you should be able to record with something like:


arecord -vv -f s16_LE -c 2 -D hw:0,1 new.wav

and that will record to the file new.wav

Pay ATTENTION to any errors you get, as ‘arecord’ is very good at giving helpful error messages. For example, I have chosen 2 channels with ‘-c 2’. Its possible you need to apply a different channel setting. I have selected a format with ’ -f s16_LE’ and it is possible you need to select a different format.

Now I am NOT an audacity user, although I have dabbled occasionally into it … On my PC my USB webcam record device is hw:1,0 (and not hw:0,1) so I started it for the first time in weeks (months ?? ) and noted immediately if I go on my PC, under audacity > edit > preferences > devices > recording I can select “USB Device 0x46d:0x821: USB Audio (hw:1,0)” and record with my USB webcam mic.

and the recording works well.

You should be able to do something similar, but you need to look for the hw:0,1 device.

So I should startup jack this way for audio recording:

/usr/bin/jackd -R -P89 -p2048 -t5000 -dalsa -dhw:0,1 -r44100 -p512 -n2

Thanks

Jack ? I have no idea. I do not use it.

I do not need jack to record with audacity.

If you wish to use QJackCtl, i.e. JACK, you can not start Audacity in alsa mode.

If you first start JACK through qjackctl, and then start audacity in jack mode, I would believe that if you hit record on audacity portaudio input channels would appear in the qjackctl connect list. In any case, this is the behaviour at my place.

PS
In case you didn’t know, JACK also depends on ALSA. JACK is a real-time sound server, not a sound device driver.

Cheers:)

Am I right if I say portaudio is an Alsa sound server .

m-audio fast track pro works through an alsa driver ?

Pulseaudio is also a sound server?
Alsa is a sound server and device driver ?

Am I right if I say portaudio is an Alsa sound server

No!
I don’t have enough technical knowledge to give a good explanation on this. But as I understand it Portaudio is an I/O (input/output) library and an API (application programming interface) for various audio apps to hook-up with different sound-systems/sound-servers, e.g. JACK, Pulseaudio, ALSA, OSS, ESD. So, Portaudio is needed between the software programmed to use it, in this case Audacity, and the sound-server/system one wish to use.

m-audio fast track pro works through an alsa driver ?

Yes, the card is supported by ALSA

An overview of ALSA: http://www.alsa-project.org/~tiwai/lk2k/archtect.gif

How are you doing with your task?
Are you using OpenOctave?
Do you use Pulseaudio?

Just tested it its is for connection to a notebook.
Normally I use delta1010 breakout box.
dhw:0,1 was working fine we have now input and can record only we could not choose output.
Will look later on today to it…
We are using openoctave.
We do not use pulseaudio but unless I uninstalled pulseaudio it still is coming up when typing :
fuser -v /dev/snd/*

We do not use pulseaudio but unless I uninstalled pulseaudio it still is coming up when typing :
fuser -v /dev/snd/*

I think that means that pulseaudio is running, which could mean that you could have some issues using JACK. I don’t quite know the status of the JACK Pulseaudio co-operation but I know there has been some problems with this up until quite recently.
If it is relevant you could read this: How use PulseAudio and JACK? | JACK, and google for some more info of course.

Do you like the OpenOctave sequencer? I have never tried it, looks nice though.

Its all working now.
Openoctave is awesome.
First install manually linuxsampler subversion for sfz support.
The Linux Sampler Project

This is the openoctave install manual.
https://github.com/ccherrett/oom/wiki/Installing-OOM

That’s nice:)

Cheers