USB sound card crashing

[russelledwards]

Hi All

I've been experimenting with trying to get a professional USB sound card running under Debian Stretch (9.6 as I haven't applied the recent update) I'm using the standard kernel with the exception of having the non free nVidia GTX drivers installed.

At first the card, a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, appeared to work out of the box, but following a re-boot it became apparent that something was wrong, as it would sporadically fail to produce audio and I'd have to switch it off and on again several times to get it to work. I found what appeared to be a partial work around in that having GNOME sound preferences open when the card was switched on appeared to help for about a week or so as it ran perfectly every time I did this. Time has proved that this was more luck than judgement.

The OS is recognising the card, with Dmesg and lsusb giving it a device ID of 3 and identifier of 1235:800c dmesg also indicated that it's using a ehci-pci driver.

I'm now at the point where I haven't managed to get any audio out of the card for 20+ reboots of both the OS and the card so I'd really like to find a solution. From what I've managed to discover it would appear that a message is being sent to the card which is causing it to crash. I believe this because: -

1 A Ubuntu 18.10 USB drive appears to run it fine (only tested a couple of times I'll admit but I'm going to keep trying this) (dmesg etc "match" so I don't think its a mode switch issue)
2 If I boot into Debian, turn on the card and leave it running whist I shut the computer down and boot back into MAC OS the card refuses to produce audio until it's been rebooted.

Can anybody offer some advice as to how I might go about finding the cause and fixing it? Sadly debugging of this kind isn't something I have any experience of but if people are happy to guide me I'm willing to "take measurements" and feed them back.

I've spent a lot of time setting up Debian and getting everything running how I like and I'd really hate this one little thing to force me over to Ubuntu.

Cheers

Russell

[bw123]

If it works on ubuntu, there's no shame in using it.

Looks a little tricky, did you read these?
https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=linux+Fo ... lett+18i20

[sunrat]

I don't own one so haven't taken much notice, but there are a lot of posts at Linux Audio Users mailing list. Search the archives or sign up to the list if the archives don't provide enlightenment.

http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/t ... +18i20&n=5