[PlanetCCRMA] Questions that might be able to be added to the FAQs

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano nando at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Tue Feb 23 11:17:27 PST 2010


On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 21:42 -0500, Robert Vogel wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-01-26 at 08:52 -0800, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> 
> 
> > > Looking at the CCRMA website a couple of months ago, it appeared that
> > > Fedora 10 was the bet initial install for CCRMA. That's how I installed
> > > it on my quad core AMD 64 machine. But now it keeps reminding me that
> > > Fedora 11 upgrades are available. Should I let it do the upgrade ? or
> > > would it be better to do a fresh install ? 
> > 
> > I have done both. If you do an upgrade you can either use preupgrade or
> > upgrade from a dvd. There will be some left over packages after the
> > upgrade, you should use package-cleanup --problems and package-cleanup
> > --orphans for help on that (there are guides online for upgrades and
> > their gotchas). It is not as hard as it used to be. A clean install is
> > of course, well, cleaner :-)
>
> Hi Fernando,
> 
> Thankyou for the upgrade advice. It worked well up until a few days ago
> when I got a notice for a 'security update'. I was surprised that some
> of the updating was for firmware. After that, I began to have problems.
> 
> * The hardware identification has changed. It doesn't seem to recognize
> the on-board facility any more.

I assume this is on Fedora 11, right? And under which kernel are these
tests happening? "Facility" means the onboard soundcard? How many
soundcards do you have? What do you see if you do a
'cat /proc/asound/cards'? and 'cat /proc/asound/devices'?

> * Ardour no longer will record.

When you start jack, do you see both input and output ports? Any error
messages in the "Messages" panel of qjackctl? Any error messages from
Ardour? (and which Ardour version?)

> * It appears that PulseAudio is now an option. It wasn't before.

An option _where_? Sorry, it is not clear to me. 

> So here's some additional questions for your FAQ's
> 
> 1. Have you tried building CCRMA in distributions other than Fedora ?

No (if you don't count CentOS). 

> 2. How do you feel about PulseAudio ?

All warm and cozy :-) It used to be a major pain, it is getting better.
It is a step in the right direction (unified handling on audio on the
desktop). Currently it plays nice with Jack if you compile Jack with the
right options. In Fedora 11 pulse is too old and I wrap jackd in a perl
script that does the same thing as jackd and pulse themselves do in
Fedora 12. 

> 3. Do you favor Creative's Soundblaster cards at all ?

I have not had experience with them in a very long time so I can't
really comment. At the time I had some experience, I would not have
chosen them for serious applications (they used to run internally at
48KHz _only_ and if you used any other sampling rate they would resample
to that internally - hardly what you would want for serious
applications)

> 4. I no longer find modprobe.conf. Do I need to add it back ? 

Not necessary unless for some reason you want to have all cards in the
same absolute position (hardly ever necessary and won't work if there
are any usb cards around at boot time - see the current Planet CCRMA
pages for more details). In short use the card _name_ to set the device
in qjackctl. 

> 5. Am I missing a configuration step, perhaps for PulseAudio, that I
> should know about ?

Not really. I'm not clear about what is happening and why you think you
are missing something...

-- Fernando




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