I’m only new to Ardour and recently made a donation and downloaded the source tarball for a quick look under the hood. Wow!! Hard dish audio player.
I use a Mac mini with MTS multitrack studio for live work on stage and use stems for play back of bass and keys mainly additional dubs to enhance our band performance. Moreover a midi track is setup for each song for the purpose of controlling DMX lights and patch change before and during each song for FX and guitar pedalboard changes.
I’m looking at options to develop a standalone 1 RU box. Something like the JoeCo box but with midi!
Code name “GigBox” which basically the same idea a multitrack player (no recoding features) which plays multitrack up to 16 tracks from Solid state Hard disk drive. The Ardour audio and midi engine could do this but without the GUI and the fancy stuff.
In a nut shell, what would be involved in using out audio engine for multitrack audio and midi playback running as a Daemon??
Was looking to use iPad or Android app to control GigBox on stage. Song list.start stop loop between markers etc.
My idea of the GigBox is a Linux box running Debian or Fordora on a miniITX MoBo (i5 with 4gb ram) audio and midi interface built in the case.
Ethernet to upload songs to structure song directory.
Basic Color LCD for setup and operation with a 16 vertical Led vu meters which show channel level assigned to output channels. FFT through software no VST plugin needed.
If this sounds do able I have all the technical ideas expertise but lack the code Audio engine and automation skills.
Ardour maybe the answer?
I’ve already look into the Ecasound option… No midi! which is real bummer!
If the JoeCo Player http://www.joeco.co.uk/main/BBP_introduction.html could do midi and remote control I’d would have bought one but it just lack what I want in a player.
At the moment and time intensive…
I prepare my songs on a Cubase 5.1 then download the multple tracks to MTS (Multitrack studio) on my racked Mac mini for gigs. No laptops just hate the things and just so fragile. I’d prefer to do it all the hard work Ardour and support a worth while project (yes Drop Cubase and MTS) simple enough to download the completed song directly into the Gigbox. from the same computer to the gigbox over ethernet or usb stick.
Wanting a turnkey solution with the midi support there. I’m a midiodit and do alot with midi at events. I’ve looked at other audio engines using PortAudio, PortMidi which Audacity uses and also Bass.dll and Bassmidi however, I like what I see in Ardour pure C++ which 90% is already there but wrapped in all the GUI components.
A basic HDD multitrack player which is wireless connected via iPhone/iPad App or Android app to be able to edit set list adjust song order skip over and add a song on the fly. Automation to able to Play,Stop,Pause and Loop. (looping would be to loop a chorus for example to intro the band. Uses markers within the song so there must be some file contianing markers and what to do. Once loop is activated. If the song has a loop marker set once the timeloop enters the marker loop the loop is activated and continually loops until a midi noteon is received to then pass through the end marker point.
Connect remote most likely to be a wireless connection via TCP/IP socket ipMidi used UDP or OSC protocol to control the Ardour engine?I have the ideas but unable to strip out the code and do the coding stuff.
I understand this may not be allowed to cut up code however, if other are interested in such a device it may have legs.
My wish list for the last few years now and there is nothing out there but laptops loaded with large DAW apps to do a simple playing task. Having cut out the recording features makes a soultion a lot simpler. I’m happy to give it shot with some direction.
Maybe a trunk of Ardour with all the hardward to get a project going or develope from the ground up. Hardware is simple the software is stumbling block IMHO.
I’m not an expert on this but there are other linux programs which can do midi and/or audio looping such giada, sooperlooper, and seq24 so you might want to check those out.
Ardour does not run headless. A program that uses libardour to load and run a session consumes about 1-2 pages of typical C/C++ code but does not exist in any public repository.