I recently decided to try upgrading from Focusrite to RME and uh... even though people say RME works well on Linux, it is nowhere near as easy to get set up. There are a few utilities out there to help, but they are mostly abandoned, missing features, or just don't quite work right. Fortunately, alsamixer has most of what you need. It's not going to get you the full TotalMix setup, but here's how to make some sense of the 8 billion options. Some of them are still a mystery to me, so maybe someone can chime in so we can make a more complete guide.
First, run alsamixer from your terminal. Then you'll hit F6 to select the device and then select your Babyface. We're actually going to start with the capture section because there's a lot less to see. The main things to look at here are the "Main-Out ADATx" and "Main-Out ASx" options. These control the incoming levels of your ADAT inputs, with 50 being the unity value (as far as I can tell). I assume it has something to do with doubling as S/PDIF, but AS1 and AS2 are ADAT1 and ADAT2, with the rest being more obviously named. I'm not really sure what the other things on this page are for, and I have not so far found them to be necessary, but please chime in if you know.
Now the playback section, which is massive. But it all follows the same basic pattern, which seems to be Source-Destination. So, for example, "PCM-ADAT3-ADAT3" is trying to say that this is how much of software ADAT 3 should go to the physical ADAT 3 output. Every output has its own mix, so when you select ADAT 3 as your output in your DAW, it's more of a virtual output that can actually go to any physical output you want. So, for example, if I just want it to work "normally," which is to say that when I send something to ADAT 3 in my DAW it should just go to ADAT 3, then I would set "PCM-ADAT3-ADAT3" to 50. If I wanted to route ADAT 3 in my DAW to the physical ADAT 7 instead, I would set "PCM-ADAT3-ADAT7" to 50. Make sense? So here, "PCM" is just saying that this is a "virtual" output.
Here we will also see the "AS" channels as before, but also "AN" and "PH." "AN" is for "analog" and "PH" is for "phones," or analog outputs 3/4 (hence why they are PH3 and PH4 instead of PH1 and PH2). This is good to know because mixing here is much more flexible than just using the output copying feature on the device. So you can have the same thing going to your main outs and your headphones, but not also going to ADAT or S/PDIF. Setting both "PCM-AN1-AN1" and "PCM-AN1-PH3" to 50 will get you the same signal to the left channel of both your monitors and your headphones, for example.
Next there are a bunch of "Line-" channels, which control how much you will be monitoring the incoming signals on each of the outputs. For example, "Line-ADAT8-AN2" would control how much of your incoming ADAT 8 signal you will hear coming out of your physical output 2 (typically the right channel of your monitors).
These are followed by the gain and sensitivity settings for your two line inputs. I'm not really sure why gain is here when it is also in the capture section? Or sensitivity, for that matter, but that isn't in the capture section. Same for mic gain, which comes later on. But hey, what do I know?
Then a bunch of "Mic-" channels that follow the same format as the "Line-" channels. After that, you can enable/disable the pad and 48v for your mic inputs, in this case by pressing "M" on your keyboard or just clicking on the button instead of using your arrow keys. There's also mic gain again, but neither this one nor the one in capture have any correlation to what you set on the device, so that's confusing. Then you get a few S/PDIF options, most notably turning it on or off (to use ADAT instead).
Finally, you a "Main-Out" for each of your outputs. These are the master fader for each of the mixes/outputs, so you will want to set all of these to 50 (unity) except for AN1/2 and PH3/4. If you don't have these turned up, then it doesn't matter what you did with the rest of the channels. None of the GUI options I've seen give you control over these, so I just couldn't use my ADAT until I figured this out... AN1/2 and PH3/4 you'll want to leave at 0; these seem to act more like a boost, so you'll be in for a rude surprise next time you reboot your PC if you turn them up. The last option is to toggle the clock between internal and autosync which is something I couldn't even do on the Babyface in CC mode (the instructions in the manual didn't work), so it's nice to have it here.
Until someone decides to make a proper TotalMix clone (or RME ports it over, yeah right), this does at least give you access to the ability to mix however you want. Hope this helps! If anyone has corrections, please do let me know. And a pro tip, you can use page up/down to increase or decrease the faders by 5, or you can just press a number to set it to that value (5 sets it to 50, for example).
