How to enable Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 Gen3 mixer on Ubuntu Studio 20.04.3

I have installed Ubuntu Studio 20.04.3 on my Lenovo Thinkpad W520 with success. It appears to work very well, using the included DAWS as well as others. What a fantastic collaborative project!

I would like to control my very popular Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 Gen3 audio interface. Being class compliant, it sorta works, but in order for it to be fully functional, this device needs software control.

When I use alsamixer from terminal, I see the audio interface, but when I hit F6 and select it, I get a message that there is no mixer for it. Obviously, the drivers for this functionality do not load or are simply not there.

I attempted to enable the mixer by adding the required driver configuration files I have seen out there in the /etc/modprobe.d folder. I have tried several variants out there without success:

• usb_audio.conf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zFA5piXf8Q)
• scarlett.conf (https://github.com/Focusrite-Scarlett-on-Linux/sound-usb-kernel-module)

ALSA mixer still gives me the error message: No mixer for this device!

I found this reference for the complete drivers: https://github.com/Focusrite-Scarlett-on-Linux/sound-usb-kernel-module

However, most of the command lines are rejected in Ubuntu Studio for some reason.

- Could it be that the instructions are for another distribution?

- Perhaps there are slightly different command syntaxes for Ubuntu Studio?

- Could it be the drivers are already included but my configuration is wrong?

I am looking forward to getting this working and I appreciate any form of support.

Please advise. Many thanks in advance.

Paul Isabelle

What to make sure?

• you are on 5.14 or better even 5.16 kernel
• you have in /etc/modprobe.d/scralett.conf following line options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8212 device_setup=1

Reboot with the above to make sure everything gets loaded.

To see if the driver is present and enabled: dmesg | grep -i -A 5 -B 5 scarlett should display information like:

New USB device found, idVendor=1235, idProduct=8212, bcdDevice= 6.0b
Product: Scarlett 4i4 USB
Focusrite Scarlett Gen 2/3 Mixer Driver enabled pid=0x8212

What I found useful was to use a sledgehammer approach options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8212 device_setup=1,1,1,1 to pass that option to the first 4 USB audio devices if you have more then one sound device like USB camera etc.

Very useful source of information: https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23272