On May 07, Jaime Oliver wrote:
Hi Derek,
Do you have the UFX working properly in Ubuntu?
Are you able to control the hardware from there? like setting the gain or compressor or phantom power for a mic for example?
best,
J
Hello,
I have the little brother UCX with less ins/outs but it's only halfrack size instead of full rack (handy for throwing into an old GPS device case and taking to gigs!), but I'm assuming that the software situation will be similar. The way to control these interfaces from the computer is TotalMix and as far as I know, RME only makes these for Windows and OS X only and there's no Linux clone. Looking on my install of Ubuntu Studio, there's Linux clones of the software for the Hammerfall devices, but the UC* series isn't a part of that (and the original UC without the X isn't even class compliant). I haven't really done any massive multichannel recording stuff, I'm a percussionist by training so I usually use the UCX for live processing myself with Pure Data or Supercollider or on the rare occassion record myself so at most the number of mics I have going in at one time have been about two or three. I could imagine it being a hassle if you're trying to close-mic a chamber to even larger ensembles if you're stuck with adjusting the gains of even 8 separate inputs with just the knob...
Here's the big problem (even outside of that) though and imho a pretty big design flaw: you CAN'T set phantom power to the individual XLR ins from the interface itself. I remember spending hours trying to figure it out... What the interface allows though is to set separate presets so what I did is I went on a friend's Mac, opened up TotalMix and saved all the possible 2^2 = 4 phantom power combinations for the 2 XLR ins of my interface (off/off, on/off, off/on, on/on). So I just set the preset combo in the knob I want. The UFX has 4 XLR ins = 4^2 = 16 possible combinations for phantom on/off... I just looked it up and it notes that it has 16 presets for EQ/Low cut but I'm assuming you can use those to set phantom as well since the UCX can? I'm not sure since I don't have access to a UFX so you might have to investigate that further...
I got my UCX when I was still a OSX user so I didn't consider these options at the time... but I'm pretty happy with using the interface under Linux with the minor (for my small-scale stuff) hassle of only being able to control settings via the one knob on the device.
I'm hoping that with the (very) slowly growing popularity of the Linux desktop via Steam games and dissatisfaction with W10/OSX that pro audio companies will pay more attention to Linux in the future. We finally got our first commercial DAW in Bitwig a while back and I think Reaper is finally making its way to Linux. Until then, it's sort of like being a second-class citizen in the pro audio world using Linux, but I'd much rather use it over the two major alternatives... There's great open-source options for Linux, but the larger commercial software companies don't pay us much attention just yet...
Hope this helps!
Derek
===================== Derek Kwan www.derekxkwan.com