[pulseaudio-discuss] New user with questions on multiple USB sound devices

[Dewey Smolka]

On Feb 13, 2008 8:44 AM, Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 28.01.08 20:52, Dewey Smolka (dsmolka at gmail.com) wrote:
>
> > The main question is: Is this even possible with Pulse?
>
> Even if you can by jumping through some loops, I am quite sure you
> don't want to do this.
>
> If you need to combine two seperate sound cards into one, then you
> need to do adaptive resampling to deal with the deviating
> crystals. Now, PA can do that for you. But this is a bit sloppy, and
> I would assume that it isn't really suitable for audio production.

For what it's worth, I did eventually get jack diplomat to work for me
but wasn't very happy with the results. It was able to handle the
adaptive resampling, but as you suggest not at a latency or at a
reliability level that would allow for high quality multi-track audio.
Driving one or the other device by itself was fine, but both working
together didn't go so well.

It's really that I pulled the trigger on a couple purchases before I
truly understood what I needed and how to do it. I still like the
Lexicon Omega and will keep it for portable recording. It works great
as a 4-channel input device as long as all the mixing and processing
is in software. But it isn't really possible to use it if
hardware-based mixing is required.

I ended up buying an M-Audio Delta 1010lt, which can do 8x8 duplex
analog plus MIDI plus SPDIF and is pure plug-and-play in Ubuntu
Studio. Best $200 I've ever spent.

Thanks for the input.