Yesterday I bought myself a shiny new toy: a Midiplus Audiolink. With this USB-device you can connect your guitar to your computer. (According to lsusb the chip is a ‘Texas Instruments Japan PCM2904 Audio Codec’.) I may not have an electric guitar, but my wonderful Crafter TC035/N does have an element pick-up and built-in preamp. With this device I can record and play-back without having to buy an expensive amplifier.
When I bought it, I got a driver CD as well as warnings for Win
dows Vista. I hadn’t checked for Ubuntu compatibility, so I did expect some troubles and braced myself for hours and hours of fiddling with JACK to make it work. So I started with installing Ardour and trying if I could get anything recorded there. Nothing.
Then I remembered
my system was sporting the flexible PulseAudio. So, I went to volume control, saw the Audiolink listed under input devices. After I had selected it, I opened the GNOME Sound Recorder, pressed record and started to play. Bingo! Everything just worked. No fiddling needed. All you have to do is to select a different input, using the default volume control.
This really demonstrates the power and user-friendliness of PulseAudio. I know that with JACK it is possible to do quite a lot with input sources, but that is too much for what I want. I just need something simple and this is working great for me! Thank you PulseAudio developers!