socranop 0.4.92a1

Soundcraft Notepad control utilities

Linux Utilities for Soundcraft Mixers

Soundcraft Notepad mixers are pretty nice small-sized mixer boards with Harmon USB I/O built-in. While the USB audio works great in alsa without any additional configuration needed, there are some advanced features available to the Windows driver that have no Linux equivalent. Most importantly, the USB routing for the capture channels is software-controlled, and requires an additional utility. For example, by default the Notepad-12FX sends the Master L&R outputs to USB capture channels 3 and 4, but this routing can be changed to input 3&4, input 5&6, or input 7&8. This tool aims to give this same software control of the USB capture channel routing to Linux users.

Supported models:

• Notepad-12FX
• Notepad-8FX
• Notepad-5

Prerequisites

The D-Bus service relies on PyGObject which is not available via pypi without a lot of dev libraries for it to compile against. It is usually easier to install separately using your distribution's package installation tools:

Ubuntu:

sudo apt install python3-gi

Fedora:

sudo dnf install python3-gobject

Installation

Installation

FIXME05 This section needs to be rewritten for the session dbus

sudo pip install socranop

It is not recommended to use --user mode and install this system-wide so that the D-Bus service auto-start can reliably find the right python libs.

Set up the D-Bus service so it can access the system bus and be auto-started on demand:

sudo socranop-dbus_service --setup

The D-Bus service will run as root, providing access to the underlying USB device so the socranop-ctl user-facing part can be run by an unprivileged account.

Upgrading

FIXME05 This section needs to be rewritten for the session dbus

Simply update your package from pip, and rerun the 'setup' to ensure the D-Bus service is upgraded to the latest version:

sudo pip install -U socranop
sudo socranop-dbus_service --setup

Uninstallation

FIXME05 This section needs to be rewritten for the session dbus

You can remove the D-Bus and xdg files first by running the following as root:

sudo socranop-dbus_service --uninstall

Then remove the package with pip:

sudo pip uninstall socranop

Prepared Packages

The previous version of this software, called 'soundcraft-utils' had Arch Linux and NixOS packages. These will have to be re-done with the rename to 'socranop'

Usage

GUI

socranop-gui

• Select the desired input using the up and down arrow keys or using the mouse
• Apply the selection by clicking "Apply" (ALT+A)
• Instead of applying the selection, clicking "Reset" (ALT+R) will set the selection back to the current state of the mixer (if known)

CLI

List possible channel routing choices:

socranop-ctl [--no-dbus] -l

Set channel routing:

socranop-ctl [--no-dbus] -s <number>

When using the --no-dbus, write access to the underlying USB device is required. Normally only root can do this, unless you've added some custom udev rules.

TODO

• Polkit restrictions on the D-Bus service
• Multiple device support
• Auto-duck feature
• Firmware upgrade