Hello:

Could anyone be so kind as to recommend me a soundcard with, at least,
4 inputs with good stable LINUX drivers? It will be better 4 mic
inputs with pahntom and pre-amps but we could live with 4 line inputs
and have the pre-amps apart.

We need a good soundcard for a speech processing laboratory project
with all the software being developed in Linux.

Thanks!!!

Best regards,
Fran

In article ,
Fran wrote:

Could anyone be so kind as to recommend me a soundcard with, at least,
4 inputs with good stable LINUX drivers? It will be better 4 mic
inputs with pahntom and pre-amps but we could live with 4 line inputs
and have the pre-amps apart.

The ALSA support for Delta cards (the ENVY24 chipset) is excellent.

I don't know why you'd look anwhere else besides M-Audio for a
multichannel sound card for use with Linux. I think you will be
hard-pressed to find someone that has gone this route, who is not
blissfully happy with their decision also.

It is rumored that Echo devices work under ALSA now. It took them so
long to come around, though, that I gave up, thus I have not actually
tried to use my Layla under linux yet. (They were plainly hostile to
the ALSA developers, taking a "no way, no how, not ever" approach to
documenting their devices, and it went on like that for years.)

M-Audio cards are not expensive, and they are good enough even for
audio snobs. Some snobs are in love with their RME/Digi devices, so
there may be a counterpoint argument.

Mic preamps are another story though. For speech applications you
should just get a mixer that has mic pre's and has an output for each
channel. Even if you did find a multichannel soundcard that has linux
support and has internal preamps, you'd be making a big compromise and
limiting your options severely, just for that feature. Even low-cost
mixers these days have decent preamps. I got in trouble already for
mentioning Behringer, so I won't mention them here.

Hello:

Thanks James. I'll check M-Audio stuff. I like RME too, but do they
work ok with Linux?

We've got some LA Audio Mic pre-amps that should work ok. Anyway,
money is not a big problem in this issue so we could spend some to
have a nice set-up.

Thanks!

Best regards,
Francisco J. Rodriguez

Fran wrote:

Hello:

Thanks James. I'll check M-Audio stuff. I like RME too, but do they
work ok with Linux?

We've got some LA Audio Mic pre-amps that should work ok. Anyway,
money is not a big problem in this issue so we could spend some to
have a nice set-up.

Thanks!

Best regards,
Francisco J. Rodriguez


Yes, they do. ALSA is more or less the defacto audio archetecture for
Linux. The list of currently supported sound cards is at:

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...dor=All#matrix

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:41:23 +0000, james wrote:

In article ,
Fran wrote:

Could anyone be so kind as to recommend me a soundcard with, at least,
4 inputs with good stable LINUX drivers? It will be better 4 mic
inputs with pahntom and pre-amps but we could live with 4 line inputs
and have the pre-amps apart.

The ALSA support for Delta cards (the ENVY24 chipset) is excellent.

I don't know why you'd look anwhere else besides M-Audio for a
multichannel sound card for use with Linux. I think you will be
hard-pressed to find someone that has gone this route, who is not
blissfully happy with their decision also.

It is rumored that Echo devices work under ALSA now. It took them so
long to come around, though, that I gave up, thus I have not actually
tried to use my Layla under linux yet. (They were plainly hostile to
the ALSA developers, taking a "no way, no how, not ever" approach to
documenting their devices, and it went on like that for years.)

Hiya. I have my old Echo Gina-20 working fine with ALSA. There is also a
mixer and monitoring router gui that is a bit more flexible than the
Windows version.

Echo eventually released the core of their combined driver for their
earlier cards (Gina,Layala etc) under the GPL. They have not released the
source for some of the more recent ones though.

The Echo ALSA driver is still not included with the main ALSA driver
bundle, so you have to compile it seperately. It's not a trivial task
unless you are used to that kind of thing, but there are clear
instructions. I reackon it will be included once the tidying up and
removal of C++ code is finished.


M-Audio cards are not expensive, and they are good enough even for audio
snobs. Some snobs are in love with their RME/Digi devices, so there may
be a counterpoint argument.

Mic preamps are another story though. For speech applications you
should just get a mixer that has mic pre's and has an output for each
channel. Even if you did find a multichannel soundcard that has linux
support and has internal preamps, you'd be making a big compromise and
limiting your options severely, just for that feature. Even low-cost
mixers these days have decent preamps. I got in trouble already for
mentioning Behringer, so I won't mention them here.