mcclusky Posted July 28, 2020 Share Posted July 28, 2020 I routinely swap laptops between my Macbook Pro and a Chromebook (Pixelbook) when working from home. The Chromebook, however, doesn't seem to recognize the Helix as an audio device. I'm just trying to output sound to the Helix as that's where my speakers are connected. Any ideas? Has anyone else got this to work? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DunedinDragon Posted July 29, 2020 Share Posted July 29, 2020 I'm more or less guessing here, but Chromebooks don't run a typical Windows OS but rather a chrome browser that looks a bit like Windows. That being the case it wouldn't have the device support available to Windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kringle Posted July 29, 2020 Share Posted July 29, 2020 If you are doing via USB it won't work - chromebooks are not windows or mac based, they are their own OS by google as DunedinDragon mentioned. if you want to run an audio cable out of the headphones of the chromebook and then into one of the 1/4" inputs, probably the only way I can think of. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunpointmetal Posted July 29, 2020 Share Posted July 29, 2020 Chrome OS is basically Android, and not too many audio devices work with Android. Since it isn't like Windows with various driver installation options and its not 100% class compliant, its rare to have audio stuff work. The main reason Android has such poor audio support compared to iOS is that there are literally tens of thousands of hardware configurations that stuff would have to work with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcclusky Posted July 29, 2020 Author Share Posted July 29, 2020 Hey thanks for the responses -- just a couple points however: It appears that chromebook works with other USB audio interfaces such as a Focusrite Scarlet. So I believe in general it supports USB audio devices. Yes chromeOs would be more similar to linux, not android. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HonestOpinion Posted July 29, 2020 Share Posted July 29, 2020 17 minutes ago, mcclusky said: Hey thanks for the responses -- just a couple points however: It appears that chromebook works with other USB audio interfaces such as a Focusrite Scarlet. So I believe in general it supports USB audio devices. Yes chromeOs would be more similar to linux, not android. Also found this link on Reddit advising Chrome OS users search for Linux users who have gotten it to work. Included a couple of other links from folks who got it to work or sort of work under Linux. There are probably more out there. https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/6dw2rv/recent_chromebooks_with_usb_sound_output/di5ytvr/ https://line6.com/support/topic/55461-i-got-helix-to-work-as-an-audio-interface-in-linux/ https://line6.com/support/topic/30896-helix-as-interface-on-linux/ Chrome OS is running a Linux kernel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_OS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunpointmetal Posted July 30, 2020 Share Posted July 30, 2020 By the time you get it working as anything other than a headphone output you could have got a temp job and bought a real laptop. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HonestOpinion Posted July 30, 2020 Share Posted July 30, 2020 6 hours ago, gunpointmetal said: By the time you get it working as anything other than a headphone output you could have got a temp job and bought a real laptop. LOL! Guess it comes down to whether you have more time or more money. For a lot of folks right now it might be more time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
donkelley Posted August 7, 2020 Share Posted August 7, 2020 FYI - android is built from some of the same foundations as linux - but most of it's system and concepts are completely distinct from how linux works. Android and ChromeOS are independent operating systems, built for different purposes, and of course may share some similarities... but one could not say that chromeos is android. It's quite unique in what it runs, and how it runs it. But of course, they do share a few pieces, which would be dumb for Google not to have done. My brother was director of technology at PalmSource when Google came to him to negotiate a way to utilize parts of PalmOS in the new operating system Google was developing - soon to be named Android (2 decades ago). There are aspects that are unix or linux based in nearly all modern operating systems (so basically everything other than windows...)... modern being really anything invented within the past 4 decades, more or less. You can go back and run the same bash commands on an Amiga or on your android phone (with a terminal app installed) and they will work identically. The filessystem structure might superfically seem similar, once you get into the private system folders in Android and ChromeOS and MacOS, for example. But they aren't compatible in any deep, meaningful way, and any audio hardware that happens to work on one OS is either uniquely supported intentionally by the OS (built in or with a special driver), or the hardware itself includes standards-compliant USB protocol for the fundamental audio it processes, so it will work easily, if only in a basic way, on lots of hardware. If plugging in a helix does nothing, then I doubt it's an easy hill to climb to get it to become compatible. It might require low level knowledge and development, even. If you want to make something run under ChromeOS or Android, you have a lot of work ahead of you. :-) I DO think it would be incredibly useful if you could use a chrome book with helix products..... so if you succeed at all, please let us know! I just think it'll be more effort than it's worth, if possible at all (I mean, I'm sure it's possible, but you might need to go get a job with line6, have them agree to pay you to do this (IE is it worth their money), just so you can have access to all of their existing driver code for other platforms to see if you can build something that allows the basic stuff to work under Chrome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skalamanga Posted August 8, 2020 Share Posted August 8, 2020 (edited) There are one or two other threads about general linux support on this forum. I updated my Arch machine to kernel 5.7 to get it working, as a patch was accepted into the kernel source at the end of the 5.6 branch. Unfortunately, chromeos has only gotten as far as the 5.4 kernel so far, although with the amount of improvements in the recent kernel 5.8 release, it's possible that this may become the next baseline for chromeos. Look at the posts at the end of this thread for info (it's not all from 2013:)) Edited August 8, 2020 by Skalamanga Added link to another thread Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonandtice Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 My understanding is that what is in the the 5.7 kernel is basically a hack to get the Helix to work as a class compliant device. If Line 6 would fix the Helix, instead of pretending it's fully class compliant, it would work everywhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kringle Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Not sure I agree - that would cost development cycles and open up support needs/requests. and no one really uses chromebooks or linux for audio or production work. it's not a good use of Line6's resources to open up for those platforms. I'd rather they worked on making the product better for the 99.9% of users on PC & Mac. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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