I am trying to use the shuttle controls and knobs on an M-Audio Axiom 25 to control Ardour. In the manual on this site, I found some info specific to Behringer products, but nothing about the general program changes, etc. to set up my controller. Where can I find this info? Also - does my version of Ardour even support a control surface? I found one post here in the forums that said this feature was disabled at one point… BTW I am using Ubuntu Dapper if that matters.
The information about the behringer product is general information in the sense that most of it applies to any midi device.
You need to set up your midi ports, make sure the midi device is sending the events to that port and make sure ardour uses that midi port for midi parameter control. Then ctrl-middle click on elements you want to control with midi (gain faders, panners, plugin parameters etc.), and voila.
Thanks Sampo! That does the trick for the mixer window. I’m still not quite there yet, and I’m still frustrated trying to find info in the manual (btw are there any other docs, or just the manual?)
I still can’t get all of the transport controls to work. I actually did get play, stop and record on my controller to trigger the correct buttons in Ardour at one point - just by blind fiddling - but I even lost that when I was fishing for the correct numbers for rewind, ff, and loop. I can easily change these buttons to anything, it’s just that finding what the anything should be is proving too big a black hole to navigate by spelunking only.
Questions: where can I find a list of events/CC’s/Program Changes/whatever that Ardour specificially wants for the transport controls? Is the CTRL-Button2 thing supposed to work on the transport controls, b/c I don’t get the little dialog like I do in the mixer?
All the manual says about the xport controls is this:
“The 4 buttons in the lower right corner are already mapped in Preset 2 to the MMC transport controls Home (or rewind to the beginning of the session), Fast Forward, Stop and Play, as shown here.”
transport controls are sensitive only to MMC, not generic MIDI CC messages. most control surfaces with transport buttons generate MMC, but you have to explicitly ask ardour to respond to MMC in the MIDI tab of the options editor. this is a standard feature on DAWs, since you may wish to disable its response to MMC in some configurations. if your surface doesn’t send MMC, its not hard to program most devices to do it.
Thanks Paul - that was the bit of info I needed. I am totally happy with how my device works with Ardour now. It is a great setup.