Hi all, firstly thanks a lot for your hard work in getting these drivers to us. I have two M-Audio Profire Lightbridge units (got the second one as I thought the first was faulty). I've had to upgrade to the latest ffado driver, jack version and ieee3194 driver to get a stable system (I downloaded the svn sources and compiled on my machine). OS is (Ubuntu studio 12.04 64bit on an HP Elitebook 8440p laptop (intel i5, 8GB mem, hyperthreading on - 4 logical cores, two physical cores). Jack running in real time on the low-latency kernel (default kernel for the distro).
I have a built-in firewire interface on the laptop motherboard (ricoh chipset) and I purchased an expressbus card (TI chipset) as M-audio recommended the TI chipset. Both give the below xrun errors, but the TI chipset unit seems better than the built-in.

Recording software is Ardour.

Problems are many and varied, but here's a list as far as I can remember:

1. Xruns occur on record or playback. Looking at the Jack message window, when jack first starts, no xruns are seen until the recording software is started, after which Xrun messages appear in the Jack message window every few seconds forever after. Recording or playback to multiple tracks (I tried 8, 16 and 32 parallel) seems to have the same frequency of xuns. changing the buffer size and number of buffers per something (can't remember as I don't have the OS booted) seems to have no effect on the frequency of xruns (I'm currently at buffer size of 1024 and number per is 3) - tried various buffer size values from 128 to 2048).

Above behaviour persists regardless of the clock source selected on the M-audio lightbridge unit. I tried internal, S/PDIF and all four of the ADAT interfaces. Clock source definitely changes within the M-audio unit, as it is indicated by an LED on the front panel.

2. Jack only starts once. once it's started, you can't cleanly stop it and it will never start properly again until a reboot.

3. Once Jack is started, the mixer (ffado-mixer dummy) will loose connection with the unit and will never re-connect until reboot, regardless of the condition of Jack (running, killed etc). I had lots of connectivity issues with the mixer until I upgraded everything to latest source versions, as above, where it now seems stable and repeatable. I believe the inability to connect is due to Jack not exiting cleanly and holding some resource locked.

4. The M-audio lightbridge starts up with none of the ADAT interface inputs enabled (probably the cause of some of the comments below regarding playback but no record). With the Windows M-Audio driver applet you can click boxes to enable each interface. The ffado-mixer dummy obviously doesn't have these check boxes, but you can enable each interface by selecting it as the clock source, via the drop-down selection box in the mixer window. Each interface can be selected once; on the second and subsequent attempts (in the ffado-mixer window) a pop-up message informs that the clock frequency couldn't be selected, and the gui drop-down menu remains at the previously selected value. However the M-audio unit does indeed change to the selected input, which is now out of sync with the indication in the mixer drop-down window.

All the above issues can be worked around except the xrun issue, which of course is fatal, as the unit can't be used without clean audio.

Can anyone suggest what could be the cause? I'm happy to lend an M-audio lightbridge unit for development, or carry out testing myself on any new code, if required.

Any logs and diagnostics can be run on request - just tell me what to do and what output to capture.

Cheers

Doug

Computer Consultant, Amateur musician, PA/recording hobbyist

Just yesterday we fired up ffado on my ProFire Lightbridge, and lo and behold, it worked pretty much out of the box.

We didn't do extensive testing, but all channels are listed in JACK, and at least MIDI input and 2 channels of output (to a Behringer DDX3216) seems to fork fine.

As we use the device, I'll report back with more test results.

I have received the following devices from M-Audio:
* ProFire 610
* ProFire 2626
* ProjectMix
* Solo

I didn't have the chance to unpack them yet, but that should change in the near future.

This doesn't contain the ProFire Lightbridge. However that device is a fairly standard BeBoB device and should work with FFADO's generic BeBoB support. At least so I've heard.

Pieter

I don't know. Things have gone quiet on the M-Audio front of late. I don't know if it's because none of the developers have M-Audio devices or if we struck a road-block getting information out of M-Audio. I've been concentrating on other devices and haven't really paid any attention to the progress (or lack thereof) in the M-Audio area.

Any news on this??

I'll be soon buying this interface, and I'd love to be able to use it in linux... Is there anything I could do to help when I have the lightbridge? Im not a software developer, I have no programming skills but I'd like to help