ardour 5.11 and faderport recommendation

As usual a fantastic update. The VCA automation works very stable even when i draw the most senseless curves with the nanokontrol :slight_smile: Thanks to all of you! :slight_smile:

And I d like a suggestion from the community: I m looking for something like the Faderport8 but more on my (lower) budget: 4 faders would be sufficent (basically for riding the VCA´s) and i dont need no extra controls… I would especially need high quality faders, and thats it. is there something like this available? I remember years ago there was someone working on a diy controler with hi end faders and posting it to the forum…

so any recommendation is appreciated…!

This fader jumping is probably because Mixbus does not limit the faders to +6dB (depending whom you asks it’s not a bug but a feature) watch the numerics in the mixer-strip.
When the value exceeds +6dB, it wraps around (jump to 0) for various control-surfaces.

For the FaderPort 8, that should be fixed though Mixbus 4.1. Then again, this could also be something different…

The FP8 here came with firmware 1.01 and that works just fine. The problem is a factory-reset which does also reset the firmware to 1.0 (as documented in the manual).
Did you do a reset? What firmware upgrade are you alluding to?

ah i thought there was a version higher than 1.01…

yes it came with 1.01 and it still is, thing is: testing with mixbus32c i had some weird jumps from 100 to 0 and vice versa when i automated faders and i thought this was related to an old firmware, but maybe the problem is in mixbus… i ll see if i can reproduce this…

and yes i guess i was wrong, i thought this here would give me the possibility to make a firmware update

https://www.presonus.com/support/downloads/FaderPort-8

@ x42 I didnt know that, thanks for clarifying!

I finally got the faderport 8 and I m very happy with it. I love the haptics and as you say the control for plugins is great! so for mixing it was a perfect choice. the faders are silent and all goes smooth… I would need to firmware update the fp8 because sometimes the fader jumps from 0 to 1 which should be resolved in an update as i read… as usual theres no linux software for the update so i am testing right now with wine if this is possible…

for generating music I would love to see the touch automation also working right away for plugins. it also works like it is, where you enable touch by mouseclick of a parameter of a plugin and then tweak it with the fp8. but it would be great, especially with the mixbus32C, to just hit “touch” button and start automating…

and I made the same experience: I was first sceptical with the missing knobs per channel, but after a day of work i dont miss them at all… having typical knob controls on faders is first a bit strange but when you get used to it it can be very precise and even better than rotary encoders…

Note that you currently cannot control plugins using the X-touch (or any MCU) in Ardour (while with the FaderPort8, you can). I was actually surprised how little I miss an encoder per channel-strip on the FP8. YMMV.

I also checked a bit on xtouch vs FP8 and i think it is pretty production specific what would be better. the feel of the faderport was imo better, and it is a bit smaller and more flat… the xtouch seems to be more flexible because of the rotary nobs when doing plugins or effects etc… I havent heard them but they say the faders on the xtouch are considerably more silent than the faders on the bcf2000 (which for me in a studio environment was too noisy) but better get some more opinions from people actually using the xtouch…

Yesterday I connected one of my old BCF2000s to Ardour for some automation work and even though the faders are a bit noisy, using real fader and knobs is SO nice compared to mousing around on screen. Physical knobs let me mix with my ears instead of looking at the screen which to me is rather distractive.

I might consider upgrading to FP8 later on but need to find out pros and cons to going X-touch instead.

little update here: I finally decided to try the faderport 8 and integration in Ardour / mixbus works fantastic and the learning curve is not steep, a good decision for now, especially because i want to run VCAs with the faderport and it is easy to do this…

Thank you lenovens for your advice! Yeah i had a feeling that it get expensive fast. i ll look into xtouch and the faderports and will see which ones are more silent…

Quite honestly, DIY motor faders tend to get pricey. The faders themselves are not too bad, but the support circuitry is a bit more. The brain has to be more capable, a display becomes a requirement as an indication of which channels you are currently banked to. The x-touch compact starts to look pretty good, for example.

I am going to try using encoders for my faders. Set up like a mouse wheel, but with much higher resolution and a 3.5 to 4 inch wheel. I will be using OSC instead of MIDI for my project (I think).

thank you for your suggestions!

well, hi quality faders in my case would mean: motor faders, which are pretty silent (significantly more silent than the bcf 2000) and preferably 100mm faders… I would just assign them to the VCA s and thats it, all the other stuff i m pretty ok with shortcuts and mouse.

I m just checking the diy projects, very cool! But I guess i need to buy a finished product cause I would need the faders on a job soonish :wink:

calimerox: I have not seen much that is cheap and good :slight_smile: (the FP and FP8 try to be that already) The term “high quality faders” leaves me at a bit of a loss. Do you require motor faders? That is would you be banking these faders or using them only on the same four (or whatever) vcas? If you need motor faders, take a look at http://ucapps.de/index.html?page=mbhp_mf_ng.html and the rest of the MIDIbox site. If you don’t need motor faders… you can get reasonable 4inch (100mm) faders for $10-ish. The nano arduino (i paid about $25 for 5 of them, so $5 each) has 8 analog ports. It also has a serial port which can be used either over USB or from the board. I do not know if it can be set close enough to 31kbaud for the MIDI connector your audio interface might have. I also do not know if the serial to midi kernel driver (assuming you are using Linux) would just work with midi showing up on a serial port. However it would be easy to create a serial to jack midi userspace driver. (this is what I did with http://www.ovenwerks.net/software/midikb.html, but from the keyboard not a serial port… almost the same)