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.

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Le concert d’Amparanoia sera en direct dimanche soir à 22h sur les ondes de Radio Esperanzah!.

Il nous reste juste … à trouver des micros d’ambiance, à faire câbler le tout, à trouver une petite place en backstage et à remettre en place le disposition inauguré pour Radio Bemba l’année dernière.

Mêmes ingrédients : icecast, ices2, quelques M-Audio et beaucoup de Ogg Au travail et à demain soir.

If you load the snd-usb-audio without option with the current (2.6.24) linux kernel, your Audiophile USB will send you a nice “noise”.

$ arecord -vvv -D hw:2,1 -c2 -t raw -r48000 -fS24_3BE /tmp/test.raw
Recording raw data '/tmp/test.raw' :
Signed 24 bit Big Endian in 3bytes, Rate 48000 Hz, Stereo
Hardware PCM card 2 'Audiophile USB (tm)' device 1 subdevice 0
Its setup is:
[...]
Max peak (12000 samples): 0x007ff202 #################### 99%

But if you take look, it isn’t a noise, it’s a swapped endian stream.

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For 4 years, Radio Esperanzah! capture about 30 hours of live each year for the Esperanzah! festival. Until the 2007 edition, we used various recorders (from Archos Gemini to Tascam Compact Flash recorder). But recording something like 20 concerts with a mobile device consumes a lot of time. Lives at Esperanzah! are performed sequentially on two stages. You need to plug and unplug everything 80 minutes and move the capture system to the other stage. It’s painful.

For this 2007 edition, we betted on a new system : install a computer on each stage for the whole festival. The idea is simple : each “satellite” records continuously and recorded files are retrieved periodically by our NAS server via wifi. No (or less) useless movement, the same setup installed for the three days of festival, no cable to plug/unplug, …

A great idea … but it required a lot of preparation. Here are some of the problems we had to solve.

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One of the challenges for Radio Esperanzah 2007 was broadcasting in live the Monday special event with Manu Chao Radio Bemba.

On the stage, outputs were the same than for the other lives : stereo lines with the frontstage, two lines from the ambiant microphones.

No way for us to mix these 4 signals before sending them to our studio. Firstly, no space in the loaded sound setup : two huge Midas mixers are installed for the evening. Our small setup (PC tower, 1U compressor/limiter/cables) have just a place under one of mixers. Secondly, .. we don’t have the required mixer. A small Behringher UB isn’t the right device for the job.

So the main part of the problem was sending to our studio the 4 captured lines.

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