So after all these years, and much improvement to the software, I am still not able to set up Ardour as a slave of an external hardware MIDI sequencer.
What I want to achieve:
- Send MIDI clock pulses and “start/stop” messages from an external sequencer to Ardour via the audio interface
- Have Ardour set it’s BPM based on the incoming clock pulses
- Make the Ardour transport start playback when a “start” message is recieved
- Make the Ardour transport stop playback when a “stop” message is recieved
This is how the connections look in Ardour. I’m using version 7.3 on Linux with Jack:
The messages are showing up in the tracer:
I have the “external position sync” enabled, it says “M-Clk”.
When I press play on the external sequencer, the playback button is engaged, however the playhead only moves a little bit forward, before quickly jumping back to the starting position again, and stays there.
Am I doing something wrong here? Is this feature supported at all? Has anyone got it working? I do not actually want “external position sync”, I merely want the tempo to stay in time with the incoming clock pulse, as well as the transport reacting to incoming start/stop messages.