I’m trying to use a Behringer X-Touch Mini in Generic Controller mode. I used the X-Touch editor to switch the buttons to toggle, so I when I hit a button, it would light up. Hitting it again would make the button turn off again. However, I can’t map this to the mute buttons, since the expect note on + note off to toggle. What the buttons in Ardour are receiving now is note on for “yes, do mute” and note off for “no, don’t mute”.
I can set the buttons to be normal “keys” (setting reads “momentary”) but then they won’t light up when a channel is muted.
The feedback from Ardour to the controller works in both settings (when I click mute, the button lights up and vice versa.)
Furthermore I tried to assign the knobs of the X-Touch mini to threshold sliders of the a-compressor plugin for 8 channels. However it turns out there must be a bug/missing featured in my Ardour 5.12.0 – the MIDI learning always applies to the a-compressor instance in the first audio bus. I checked into the session file and all Threshold controllables do have the same ID. But I can cheat around this by editing the session file, giving each threshold controllable its own ID. Not that clean but OK for me.
Why I don’t get is how to get my mute buttons work.
Background info: I’m trying to create a minimalistic digital mixer using the Ardour mixer. It turns out that when mixing audio for live-stream broadcast, the latency isn’t an issue at all, I got to add latency anyways to compensate for the “slow” HDMI ports of the cameras. I’m used to larger digital mixers b Soundcraft and Allen&Heath but I want to have something with a really small signature for mini jobs on a budget. So these 4 or 6 Lavalier mics or so don’t need my 24 channel console. Basically I need “adjust volume”, “adjust compression” and “mute on/off” for this kind of job.
About the mute toggle, I have a similar setup and I use ctl-toggle as CC type for the buttons.
It reads something like: <Binding channel="10" ctl-toggle="45" uri="/route/mute S1" momentary="yes"/>
About the plugin parameter binding, again, I’ve been doing something similar in Ardour 6.3 and it doesn’t have that ID’s issue you mention.
Thanks for your reply, Diego. And thanks to the Ardour gang for obviously having fixed the plugin parameter control via MIDI.
I got a question: So, while it seems to be possible to get the behaviour I want by creating a custom MIDI mapping, is it possible to do a lazy hack in the session file? Like a parameter to the MIDIControllable element?
I currently don’t want to upgrade to a 6.x version of Ardour because I got productions going on and I fear breaking my projects.
I don’t know about that. But maybe you should try using Ardour 6, so far I haven’t had any problem opening my 5.x projects. Also when you open a project created with an older version it automatically creates a new 6.x version and the 5.x version stays there, so if anything goes wrong you can go back to Ardour 5.
I got it sorted out now with the X-Touch Mini, sort of. Worked around.
So, in momentary mode, the X-Touch Mini will send: Note-on when button is pressed, Note-Off when button is released. Like playing a keyboard. Ardour takes this combination as “change stage of mute button”. Ardour sends Note-On for “mute is on” and Note-Off for “mute is off” back to the X-Touch Mini.
The X-Touch Mini does react to this. However, it goes so fast that the “button released” in the X-Touch Mini internally comes later than the command from Ardour, thus overriding the state. A possible workaround is to wire a “MIDI Delayline” (LV2) plugin between Ardour’s control output and the X-Touch Mini (using Carla, e.g.). Feels a bit strange in usage since the button replies in delay and when you hold the button, it fails again.
The alternative would be to switch the buttons to Toggle mode in the X-Touch editor and have a filter that translates Note-On to Note-On+Note-Off and Note-Off also to Note-on+Note+Off. However, I didn’t find a plugin that would do this and Mididings wouldn’t run on my machine.
Not yet perfect, but now with working functionality.
Or, one could create a MIDI Binging for the X-Touch Mini. A proper one.
Now let’s see about automatic microphone mixing (AMM). No native plugins out there yet apparently.