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Geoffrey D. Bennett feba2f4520 Update documentation for Scarlett 4th Gen and Vocaster

2024-03-24 22:40:11 +10:30

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ALSA Scarlett2 Control Panel Installation

Prerequisites

Linux Kernel

You need to be running a Linux Kernel that has the ALSA Scarlett2 Protocol Driver. Use uname -r to check what kernel version you are running.

For reasonable functionality of Scarlett 2nd and 3rd Gen and Clarett interfaces, you need at least Linux kernel version 6.7
For Scarlett 4th Gen support and firmware updates from Linux, you need at least 6.8
For Vocaster support, you’ll need to build an updated snd-usb-audio driver (or wait for 6.10)

If you’ve got a Vocaster, or if your distribution doesn’t include a recent-enough kernel for your interface, you can get the latest driver from here and build it for your current kernel:

https://github.com/geoffreybennett/scarlett-gen2/releases

Enabling the Driver

As of Linux 6.7 the driver is enabled by default. Check the driver status (after plugging your interface in) with this command:

dmesg | grep -i -A 5 -B 5 focusrite

If all is good you’ll see messages like this:

New USB device found, idVendor=1235, idProduct=8215, bcdDevice= 6.0b
Product: Scarlett 18i20 USB
Focusrite Scarlett Gen 3 Mixer Driver enabled (pid=0x8215); report
any issues to https://github.com/geoffreybennett/scarlett-gen2/issues

If you don’t see the “Mixer Driver” message or if it shows “disabled” then check the OLDKERNEL.md instructions.

Gtk4

You need a Linux distribution with Gtk4 development libraries. If it doesn’t have them natively, try the Flatpak instructions below.

Firmware

As of Linux 6.8, firmware updates of all the supported interfaces can be done through Linux. This is mandatory for Scarlett 4th Gen and Vocaster interfaces (unless you’ve already updated it using the manufacturer’s software), and optional for Scarlett 2nd and 3rd Gen, Clarett USB, and Clarett+ interfaces.

Download the firmware from https://github.com/geoffreybennett/scarlett2-firmware and place it in /usr/lib/firmware/scarlett2 or use the RPM/deb package.

Building and Running

On Fedora, these packages need to be installed:

sudo dnf -y install alsa-lib-devel gtk4-devel openssl-devel

On OpenSUSE:

sudo zypper in git alsa-devel gtk4-devel libopenssl-devel

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt -y install git make gcc libgtk-4-dev libasound2-dev libssl-dev

To download from github:

git clone https://github.com/geoffreybennett/alsa-scarlett-gui
cd alsa-scarlett-gui

To build:

cd src
make -j4

To run:

./alsa-scarlett-gui

You can install it into /usr/local (binary, desktop file, and icon) with:

sudo make install

And uninstall with:

sudo make uninstall

Continue on to reading USAGE.md for how to use the GUI.

Flatpak

With Flatpak, in any distro:

flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean flatpak-build \
    vu.b4.alsa-scarlett-gui.yml

Be sure to use flatpak-build as the directory where the flatpak is built or hence you risk bundling the artifacts when committing!

If you get messages like these:

Failed to init: Unable to find sdk org.gnome.Sdk version 45
Failed to init: Unable to find runtime org.gnome.Platform version 45

Then install them:

flatpak install org.gnome.Sdk
flatpak install org.gnome.Platform

If you get:

Looking for matches…
error: No remote refs found for ‘org.gnome.Sdk’

Then:

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

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