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.




This week in space & tech

http://www.space.com/28539-spacex-earth-space-rocket-photos.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/12/this-new-tesla-battery-will-power-your-home-and-maybe-the-electric-grid-too/

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/hiro-drone/

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0209/NASA-names-crew-members-for-2016-space-station-missions-video

http://ideas.ted.com/18-companies-driving-the-new-space-age/

http://www.charitywater.org/blog/wanna-build-your-own-sensor/

http://scottkerman.imgur.com/

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150128-space-2020-what-happens-next

http://tass.ru/en/non-political/776758

http://spacenews.com/earth-pelted-by-more-than-600-large-debris-items-in-2014-nasa-reports/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2948421/Why-sun-sad-Giant-filament-turns-solar-surface-giant-sad-face-emoji.html

http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/blog/ohio-energy-inc/2015/02/drones-seen-as-boon-to-monitoring-energy.html

http://gizmodo.com/this-camera-is-going-to-hell-and-will-send-us-pictures-1685227698

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/11/successful-test-for-europes-mini-shuttle-prototype/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/science/on-third-try-deep-space-climate-observatory-launches.html

My personal live launch watching pics:
































http://www.space.com/28515-orbital-atk-merger-private-spaceflight.html

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/02/ohio_wesleyan_university_profe.html

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-virgin-galactic-long-beach-20150212-story.html