[PD] FAO edirol users. problems with Pd and edirol usb

Nick Fells nick at music.gla.ac.uk
Wed Nov 13 10:52:14 CET 2002


hi all,

Well, thanks for all the input on this one. I've given up on edirol too,
couldn't get it to work without clicking on my dell inspiron under WinXp
(asio or otherwise) nor Alsa. Nice sound quality for 60GBP, if you can
ignore the clicks. Interesting phenomenon to note: under XP with asio
driver, running the test tone patch, I'd get occasional small clicks
under the windows (native) and ALSA drivers. Same running my granular
sampling patches. Under win with asio driver, the test tone patch makes
less frequent but much louder clicks, and the granular patches sound
like you're thrusting the Dell through an industrial grinding machine
(massive clicks with virtually every grain, it seems). Bizarre.

Guess you just have to spend the money on the bigger solutions (but,
clearly, even then you can't guarantee the manufacturers do what they
claim to do - 'roland corp', 'dell', your both bloody rubbish, that's
what I say, grrr).

Another thing to note - in the small print on the edirol website they
mention there might be problems with their products on machines that do
'interrupt sharing', something I wasn't even aware of (and certainly not
something they go out of their way to warn you about in their sales
patter...). Indeed, when I look at the resources used by my dell's
hardware, there are about 10 devices allocated IRQ11, including (wait
for it): ATI Radeon card, Ethernet card, PCI-USB adapter, 'on-board'
intel sound chip etc etc etc. (and the PCMCIA adapter, which worries me,
as even if I had say the RME Cardbus card, would this not suffer the
same fate??)

So I suppose the usb-audio is probably never going to work on that
laptop without being preempted by something else (radeon!).

Don't understand the ins and outs of this enough, but under XP you can't
reassign resources as there's no Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) - you
can set one up, but you have to reinstall the OS (AARGH, thank you Mr
Gates, what a nice man - yet again you have innovated for the benefit of
the customer). Don't know about Linux - if anyone can advise on that,
I'd appreciate it. At the moment it just seems to use the same resources
as windows (lots of 'sharing interrupt with device ...' messages at boot
up).

For what it's worth (sorry about the rant).

nick

PS the performance went well, and the sound was surprisingly <ok> using
the onboard i/o - but then it might have had something to do with the
Neumann mic




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