Hola

I just bought an RME Hammerfall Multiface PCI for the same purposes as you are looking for.

it gets amazing low latency under ASIO, and with some tuning you can get it to run pretty well with Jack under Linux. see here for Linux configuration details:

http://pd.klingt.org/files/hdsp-howto.html

<IMPORTANT> This was right, but currently NEW Multiface cards can't be used under Linux anymore.

I bought this card in order to use it under Linux and Windows, unfortunately the current PCI card firmware (v11) is not compatible with the current ALSA driver. So the idea is to downgrade the PCI card firmware to v10, unfortunately it's not possible to downgrade the firmware from v11 to v10 if you have the hardware revision v1.8 (last revision) of the PCI card. I know it works with hardware revision v1.4.

The only solution is to wait for the next version of the ALSA driver or to use the Multiface ... under WinXP.

--

Apart this card, there are these ones :

*M-Audio Delta 1010 LT (8in / 8out) (cheap) *M-Audio Delta 410 (2/8) (cheap) *see also Terratec cards (cheap) *Echo Layla 24 (8/8) : the only card that has the same quality as the RME Multiface, but less neutral (Echo cards color the sound a bit, like MOTU or M- Audio ; RME cards don't affect the sound at all)

For modern electronic music the RME looks like being the best choice

Good luck

J

Hi everyone

I have bought an RME Multiface about 2 weeks ago and this evening I programmed my first Pure Data spatialisation patch, that uses 4 independant speakers.

Here is one strange issue though :

"pd -listdev" outputs :

[...] audio OUT device #1 : Avance AC97 Audio (a crap motherboard sound card by Intel, I don't use it anymore) audio OUT device #2 : HDSP Analog out 1 & 2 (connected to speakers) audio OUT device #3 : HDSP Analog out 3 & 4 (connected to speakers) audio OUT device #4 : HDSP ANalog out 5 & 6 (connected to speakers) [...]

The Pd launching command line that allows me to use 4 speakers is the following : % pd -outchannels 4 -audiooutdev 2 -audiooutdev 3

In the patch, I use the following object : [ dac~ 1 2 3 4 ] ...which allows me to output the 4 separated signals from the patch (no other arguments working for quadraphony, I tried 3 4 5 6 too, see why below)

... But the problem is that these signals are actually output from the analogue outputs 3, 4, 5 & 6 of the Multiface. Why isn't it from 1, 2, 3 and 4 as configured ?

1 & 2 output no sound in this configuration

For stereo applications, I can use outputs 1 and 2 without any problem.

Any idea :-) ? (for example : what is the generic good working launching command line for full use of the Multiface, and the associated arguments for "dac~" and "adc~" ?)

Good night (0:17 here)

Julien

Selon Olaf Matthes olaf.matthes@gmx.de:

You should try:

% pd -outchannels 4 -audiooutdev 2

The -audiooutdev 2 tells Pd to start with device #2, -channels 4 tells Pd that you want 4 channles, so it will also open the next device (i.e. #3) to get 4 channels. If you add a second -audiooutdev it overwrites the first argument, I think. At least it works like that in Windows land...

Olaf

Thanks

It must be this, because I didn't perform the test as I didn't know that "- audiooutdev X" was the 1st output channel

Will try this evening ...

at orquestra del caos we are planning a show of artistic works based on pd and max/msp patches especially oriented to control the position of sounds...

we were very grateful for your advices, opinions and experiences on sound cards and computer configurations one should use to successfully run PD on a pentium PC through 8 independent outputs.

If you are able to run PD with the -rt flag (in Linux) you can try the M-Audio Delta 410 which have 2 analog ins and 8 outs. I don't know how it performs with ASIO in Windows. (Are there issues with PortAudio when the number of inputs and outputs are not the same? I seem to remember seeing this somewhere)

Cheers

Soeren