Alesis IO14 or IO26 Firewire in Linux with Mixbus 3.7 Success!

[Petter]

Hope this how-to-manual can help somebody:

Old PC: Core2Quad 2.66, 4GB RAM
Gigabyte Mobo with built in Texas Instrument Firewire chipset.
Install Ubuntu 16.10, 64-bit
Install Mixbus 3.7 64-bit (gcc5 version)

Add your username to the "audio" group by typing the below command in a terminal window:

sudo adduser username audio

Install the ffado driver, mixer etc by typing the below commands in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install ffado-mixer-qt4 jackd2-firewire

Apperently there are currently 2 ways of using Firewire audio in Linux. Ubuntu now has what is referred to as Alsa Firewire Stack which are kernel modules that are loaded into the operating system when you boot Ubuntu. There should be support for many Firewire audio interfaces using this BUT Alesis IO14 and IO26 does not work properly with this Driver currently. But would be happy for tips here...
Therefore, it is needed to prevent the Ubuntu’s default alsa firewire stack
for Dice chipset devices (Alesis etc.) to load under boot.

To do this run the following command in a terminal window:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf

add this row:

‘blacklist snd_dice’

Save
Roboot

Now it should be possible to use IO14 and IO26

Usage
----------------------

1. Starting Jack audio server

Run qjackctl (this is a graphical interface to control jack server)
Goto setup, select firewire driver
Select audio interface – Alesis IO should be there.
Both IO14 and IO26 are there named as I14.
Select sample rate, buffer size etc
Uncheck real-time
then press start jack
Check that the audio server is running without error messages.
(There is no sense in trying to start the Audio application if the Audio
server is not running. So it must run!)

2. Starting the Audio application (in my case Mixbus 3.7)

Start Mixbus
Since Jack is now already running, Mixbus feels this and skips the dialog window
with selecting audio system, driver etc - if you last used Mixbus with Jack. If you last used it with ALSA you will have to select JACK first then Mixbus will just say “JACK is already running” and then Mixbus will continue.
Everything Mixbus does here is just to set the most important settings for the audio interface and qjackctl provides even more settings than Mixbus so therefore it is better to start qjackctl first to handle Jack, and then Mixbus.

Comments
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There are probably other ways of doing it but this worked for me.
I am a newbie to JACK (2 days) but I googled like crazy to find this out

When using IO26, you have to manually select output 1&2 in Mixbus, otherwise
there is no sound output.

There is one strange thing: If you change I14 to something else in qjackctl, sometimes it is not possible to reselect I14 - it just says Default. Does somebody have a solution for this?
Does somebody use IO14/IO26 it with real-time kernel btw?

I would like to hear from other IO14 and IO26 Linux users out there…
Hope this could help somebody!
Big hats off for all developers!!
Since Alesis IO works in Mixbus they should also work fine in Ardour!

[Ben67200]

Thanks so much, that was very useful.

PC : Core Duo 1.66
Lubuntu 20.04

As a total newbie in the Linux world, it took some time to figure out that Gedit is the text editor of Ubuntu. For those in the same situation (Gedit not installed), you should use Nano instead of Gedit

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire.conf

This opens the text editor. Add following line at the end of the file

blacklist snd_dice

Then Ctrl O, Enter, Ctrl X

In Qjackctl, I14 did not appear, there was only default available.
I tried to uncheck and check the Real-time box and it worked in both cases

Thanks again