My first recording session with a Focusrite Saffire PRO 40

My first recording session with a Focusrite Saffire PRO 40

[Niccolò Belli]

Yesterday I did my first session with my Saffire PRO 40, I initially
tried with kernel 2.6.33.7-rt30 and the old firewire stack, but I get
xruns even for a simple playback of a previously recorded session. I
also experienced lots of graphical problems because of the intel drivers
not playing well with old kernels. When I realized it was impossible to
record such a way I booted to a 2.6.38.1-bfq-ck1 I compiled for
recording purposes (Budget Fair Queueing I/O Scheduler, Brain Fuck
Scheduler and the whole Con Kolivas patchset with a 10.000 Hz timer
frequency). I obviously used the new firewire stack. This time it was
much better and I had no problems while playing a previously recorded
session. So I attached 8 analog inputs (two of them with inserts to
guitarix_head), another two inputs from Pianoteq and 10 outputs to
headphones for monitoring for a total of 10 inputs and 10 outputs.
I used hardware monitoring, with the only exceptions of the piano, the
guitar and the bass. Unfortunately even with a 17.4ms latency
(256/44100/3) I still got xruns and I had to restart the whole recording
lots of time because of that. My hardware isn't very powerful (a 1.4GHz
Core2 Duo ULV, 5400rpm serpent256 encrypted hard disk, 4GB ram) but I
think it can do much better, because I previously recorded without
problems with a Fast Track Ultra (USB) and 2.6.33-rt (when it wasn't a
useless, ancient kernel). Next time I will use a 3,3GHz quad core Sandy
Bridge 2500K with 8GB ram, I hope it will be enough :/

Cheers,
Darkbasic