Find configuration settings and Driver information that will help your audio hardware perform the best.

Sound Cards

With the notable exception of firewire devices, the vast majority of soundcards in UbuntuStudio will be supported through the ALSA-Project drivers. These drivers tend to work 'out of the box' as they are the main sound drivers in Ubuntu. Full compatibility listings can be found at http://www.alsa-project.org The following are tweaks to improve/fix common issues with particular cards.

FireWire Audio

FireWire audio support is maturing in Linux generally, but still can provide some challenges for the creative user.

UbuntuStudio 8.04 (Hardy Heron) ships with the FreeBoB FireWire audio drivers, which implement support for a small range of external audio devices. (FreeBoB supported devices)

UbuntuStudio 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and 9.10 (Karmic Koala) ship with the FFADO driver. (FFADO supported devices) Check to see if your device is supported before installing UbuntuStudio, or making a purchase.

FFADO, the successor project to FreeBoB, also notes that some FireWire host cards are better than others

USB Audio

USB Audio devices are generally well supported - look particularly for devices that advertise 'Driver Free operation on Windows and Mac OS X'. This implies that the device is 'Class Compliant', a technical term for 'smart enough to talk to anything'! As always, though, check compatability first.

Most modern Linux distributions use a hot-pluggable architecture for USB, which means that you can add and remove devices on the fly. In everyday use, this is very helpful. However, for pro-audio use this often means that the Alsa device numbers (hw:X) of your USB sound cards and MIDI interfaces can change every time you plug them in - or boot up. See UsbAudioDevices for some advice on this matter.

Creative

Echo Audio

Several Echo Audio cards are supported by alsa, but need a firmware blob to make them work. This is available in the alsa-firmware package from Medibuntu.

The best mixer for these cards is echomixer, which is included in the alsa-tools-gui package.

Intel

QuickFix poor sound qualtiy of intel 82801H

Choppy audio was reported for the Intel 82801H on Ubuntustudio Hardy out of the box.

M-Audio

VIA

QuickFix poor sound quality of snd-via82xx

Problem described on : http://alsa.opensrc.org/Via8233#Poor_sound_quality

MIDI Hardware

Graphics Cards


CategoryHardware

UbuntuStudio/HardwareOptimization (last edited 2009-11-14 21:02:00 by pool-71-114-144-143)