Alban’s blog

We bought a M-Audio Delta 66 last year to complete our multi-track captation system. We’re working for a long time with M-Audio sound cards and especially with Delta 44 ones. So we were a bit surprised when we discovered that the M-Audio Delta 66 revision E wasn’t supported by the alsa project.

To retransmit in live the Amparanoia’s gig at Esperanzah! festival, we need a additional 4 tracks sound card. On sunday, the challenge was to configure our Delta 66.

Hopefully, the latest alsa release provides support for this M-Audio Delta 66 E into the ICE1712 driver. The debian package can be easily built from the current alsa source package (see this wiki page of the Debian EeePC project).

First problem : the alsa 1.0.17 can only be built with a kernel 2.6.25. The old P4 was initially installed with an Ubuntu Studio (David is an Ubuntu Studio fan) .. and the kernel is a 2.6.24-rt. No way to upgrade. First step : install a “fresh” lenning and its 2.6.25 kernel.

After a first successful build and a reboot, the ice1712 no longer loads, with the following message :

ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:0a.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
ALSA .../cs8427.c:234: invalid CS8427 signature 0x0: let me try again...
ALSA .../cs8427.c:241: unable to find CS8427 signature (expected 0x71, read 0x0),
ALSA .../cs8427.c:242:    initialization is not completed
ALSA .../ice1712.c:387: CS8427 initialization failed
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:01:0a.0 disabled
ICE1712: probe of 0000:01:0a.0 failed with error -14

Flow needs two minutes to find the CS8427 chipset documentation : it looks like the SPIF chipset of our M-Audio Delta 66. After several unsuccessful Google searchs on this problem, the decision is easy : we don’t need of this chipset, let’s patch the alsa driver to skip this initialization step.

We are 6 hours before the gig … and the Delta 66 is still muted …

A small comment into a switch/case of delta.c and the cs8427 is no longer initialized. A new reboot and … the module is loaded. First victory. But the hw:1 alsa device (the motherboard sound card isn’t disabled) is always silent …

A new check with alsamixer … nothing … a small test with plughw:1 and our mixer levelmeter starts to move. Final victory

The Delta 66 is finally installed in the radio “studio”, with a small behringer mixer to make the 4 tracks mix. Like the past year (and Radio Bemba’s gig), ogg123 is used to to play the 4 channel ogg stream created with ices2. A 800kb stream transmits the sound for the stage to the studio during the 90 minutes of Amparanoia’s gig

Many many thanks to Bastien for his incredible gigabit network deployed in few days in this belgium abbey.

Tags: alsa, cs8427, debian, delta 66, esperanzah, gig, icecast2, ices2, kernel, m-audio, module, ogg vorbis, streaming

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 11:36 pm and is filed under debian, general, linux, radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.