Hi all,
Does anyone know of any good, reasonably priced audio interfaces that support Linux?
I’m currently using Mac/OS/Ableton, but considering taking the jump to Ubuntu (Linux), and then use ‘Bitwig’ as my new DAW (because it’s Linux-compatible).
Only problem seems to be that my soundcard (Presonus Firebox) does not support Linux…
Also interested to hear peoples experiences with making music in DAW’s in Linux/Ubuntu.
Peace and happy holidays,
Morten
Anything USB 2.0 class-compliant should work.
I use a TC Electronic Impact Twin firewire interface (I’ve not tried the extra 8 channels of ADAT inputs yet though). It generally works well using the FFADO drivers for Jack, but things like the virtual mixer haven’t been completed as yet, unfortunately, and the internal routings of the interface need to be adjusted using Windows or a Mac (neither of which I have, so can’t report on whether that works OK).
I use Focusrite gear, the 18i20 works like a champ in Linux, however the stock UI for using it doesn’t directly work. I set up all my routing and connect directly, although someone wrote a UI for it- I don’t actually need that though.
MOTU does NOT work with Linux, and has no intention of it, so you can safely skip those.
If you do a search for Alsa supported hardware it should show great interfaces that are compatible.
you always can find somewhat dated, somewhat incomplete, but still very large list of supported hardware here:
Matrix:Main - AlsaProject
a lot of recent USB devices are class compliant or have class compliant mode, so will work with Linux.
from my own experience, known good interfaces are:
— NI Komplete Audio 6 and Traktor DJ series
— Focusrite Scarlet series
— various ESI interfaces
— Zoom LiveTrak L-12 mixer
but some of them were reverse engineered and got Linux drivers
i use allen & heath qu-pac which is compatible.
Isnt the new ultra lite 5 class compliant? I have it hooked to my iPad
I think RME has decent-ish Linux support. Babyface pro.
I tried an SSL2 on linux and it worked flawless with the default jack installation (no drivers needed).
The only thing was that I had to reconfigure jack to change the default buffersize of 512 to 64 to lower the latency.
…many good news here…
I can’t recommend focusrite on linux. my 4i4 has connection issues so I contacted support who said they won’t help me because it’s ‘only class compliant on Windows and mac’. what a load of shit. my workaround is to never unplug it.
with bigwig I currently use a behringer umc404hd via alsa and leave the 4i4 for everything else via pulse. never took the time to get jack working.
also, both bitwig and renoise made apt very unhappy wrt dependencies. so I just unpack the archives and run things from there. works great.
My experience moving to Linux has been good overall. I’m so happy to not be on a Mac anymore.
I’ve found my Tascam 2x2 works fine with Bitwig/JACK, vanilla Mint install. Gets better performance than the same machine running Windows. ALSA works too (with builtin soundcard) but performance is worse.
Have a Steinberg UR242, it‘s pluck&play with linux mint, works great with bitwig!
Unpopular opinion, but also my experience: don’t. (been there, done that…).
With a Focusrite interface it worked, but the performance was not as good.
This is my second attempt.
The sensible and productive approach is probably just to suck it up and go Apple.
But lord do I hate some of that company’s practices. Enough to give Linux audio another go. The fact that it’s (so far) plug ‘n’ play already puts it way ahead of last time I tried.
It’s a mess really… oss, alsa, jack, pulse and now pipewire… layer upon layer, more cruft and inefficient/incomplete solutions. No wonder most software (and hardware !) vendors don’t bother supporting Linux.
It’s still not the year of Linux on the desktop.
(I say this as sorry one who used to have a desktop Linux box in the late 90s, until I need to actually do work on deadlines)
On topic, though, has anyone tried the MOTU M4?
My recent experience with Manjaro is that audio more or less just works - I have a Scarlett 18i8 that Jack and/or ALSA recognise with little to no configuration and I can record and play back from Reaper with no issues. It was the same via Firewire with my previous soundcard too.
Huh, interesting. I’m hoping to use one with a Mod Duo X, which runs linux under the covers. We’ll see how it goes.
If PipeWire ends up delivering its promises, it will be a very good thing. If I’m not wrong, it aims to replace both PulseAudio and Jack by offering the same services and ABI so clients would just connect to it without even recompiling.
Yeah, audio on Linux is not exactly the easiest thing when is not the basic stuff.
Not exactly an interface, but I have a Soundcraft Signature MTK12 that acts as a 14 inputs and 12 ouputs interface. It’s USB audio compliant and worked just out of the box. But using what they call the interval output (stereo pair of tracks 11 and 12) as the default audio output for the desktop was a nightmare. (PulseAudio was using mono tracks 1 and 2 by default.)
As @obscurerobot says, it takes a lot of time to find the perfect solution. The documentation is very sparse and most of the information you end up with is not very reliable.
Ardour was much easier to configure but reducing the latency took me some time. The information in the Ardour forum is quite good, BTW.
But once you manage to get everything running, it just works. I upgraded my Debian stable last weekend and no issues so far.