Cannot activate "Latch" automation state via X-Touch in Mackie mode

#1

Hi All,

I recently started using Ardour with Behringer’s X-Touch control surface (in Mackie control mode), which is a great combination. In my last project, I was doing quite a bit of automation (mostly faders) and “latch” mode seems to work best to have ardour play back the automation until I touch a fader on the X-Touch.

Here’s the issue: I can activate all other automation state via corresponding keys on the X-Touch. The “Latch” key, however, doesn’t work. Automation just stays in whatever state it was before.

It’s not a hardware issue; when I manually assign some other action to the “Latch” key, this is executed perfectly. Also, when manually activating “Latch” state from the GUI, the key lights up, indicating the correct state.

Can anyone with a X-Touch confirm this behavior? Any thing specific I could do to debug? For reference, this is ardour 8.4.0 on Linux Mint.

Any other hints, would another protocol be better suited for Ardour control, like Midi?

Thanks a lot!
Stefan

#2

Ardour’s Mackie implementation predates Latch support in Ardour by a decade and has not been updated since.

I don’t have a Mackie surface, so cannot test, but it is a trivial one-liner:

#3

Wow, that was fast :slight_smile:
Thanks a lot!

I’m afraid of trying to build Ardour from source, so I’ll wait for the next release to test with the X-Touch…

#4

Current git/master is rather unstable (9.0 pre-alpha dev).

But if you want to give it a spin, you can try a demo from https://nightly.ardour.org/ (which can be installed in parallel to Ardour8).