Projects & all: February 2015

Monday, February 16, 2015

Getting Line 6 POD Studio UX2 to work on Linux

I was blessed to have a friend who lent me their recording gear. Here's what I did with it =P

Seek and you shall find

Luckily, someone (Markus Grabner) wrote a driver for Line 6 devices on Linux here:
http://line6.com/supportarchivenew/thread/4031
Their website is here: http://www.tanzband-scream.at/line6/
Note the link to the source code on that webpage is old - the latest should be v0.9.1beta not v0.8.1

Getting the latest version

Using svn to checkout the repo and make didn't work (I got a bunch of errors, possibly due to using svn to clone the repo causing the make command to create a bad revision.h file. I also got errors from driver.c

To get around the errors, I tried downloading the zip from sourceforge here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/line6linux/code/HEAD/tree/
(Click "Download Snapshot").

After that, just unzip, go to the "drivers" folder, "trunk" branch then $make and #make install inside that directory. Btw, for dependences, you need gcc, make, your kernel's headers (e.g. linux-headers-generic), and alsamixergui + pavucontrol (for later).

Here's a nice article about ./configure, make and #make install. http://www.codecoffee.com/tipsforlinux/articles/27.html

Plugging it in

Now for the harder part, thanks to bkmfs2 on the line6.com forums in the 1st link of this post we have:

#Then you have to find your soundcard with:
cat /proc/asound/cards
#This tells you how your Line 6 device viewed by the computer ('hw:' number).
#Replace 'hw:1' with whatever shows up for your sound card when you type:
alsamixergui -D hw:1
~~#You HAVE TO turn the 'monitor' slider all the way down or things will crash~~ (unless the 'svn' site has a newer version that fixes this).
#Just so you know, the thing is a little volitile but I was able to use my Line 6 UX2 with jack-audio with (so far) dependable success.
#Just F.Y.I., I bought a M-Audio MobilePre the other day and it works right out of the box.

I didn't have to get alsamixergui to select the device to control - I use Audacity and it allows you to switch between devices.
My favourite audio setup/control tool on linux has to be pavucontrol although I couldn't use it for audio in and I could use Audacity to select the hw2:0 device for recording, letting me record.

By using the monitor turned up to 100% in the alsamixergui, I was able to hear the input from my mic, albeit quite distorted. It obviously was more clipped when I turned up the "phones" dial and/or turned up the monitor signal from aslamixergui. This is mentioned in 4.3.5 of the driver doc manual PDF (from Markus Grabner's Tanzband-scream.net website), but I haven't been able to fix it yet. The PCM audio works phone though, using the computer to play to the phones without clipping.

I decided to get the full experience dual-booting into Windows and using POD farm (didn't want to set up WINE/VM as I was short on time and didn't want to troubleshoot any errors that would come up). However, I didn't have time to do that either (only effectively had one afternoon) so I just stuck with recording in Audacity on Linux.

Yes, this means you might get to see some art/annihilation related projects released soon showcasing the results.