Wow! I didn’t know I had such an unique device .
The Zoom R24 (and all of its siblings) are advertised as:
They only speak Mackie protocol. Ardour “generic midi” and the “Behringer BCF2000
Mackie Control” give access to the track sliders, nothing else. Not even the master slider. And even then still the “jump” behaviour of the sliders, with settings no feedback, not motorized, and smooth = 1.
I can add additional bindings, but these seem to be tied to the actual track, instead of to the visible/active tracks. (E.g. slider1 should control the top track, slider2 the 2nd top track, even when tracks are shuffled/removed/created).
I own a Samson Graphite 49, which is definitely a non-touch, non-motorised, MCP-speaking device, so there are at least two such kinds of devices out in the world.
Not that the faders are that much use in MCP mode, but they’re better than nothing, and the transport controls are also nice to have.
The Samson has assignable encoders and can be programed. It just happens to have a preset that uses PB for faders like a MCP does. Same for some M-Audio keyboards. I guess that’s provided for some compatibilty, but it’s pretty much useless.
Yes, I agree the faders aren’t that much use in MCP mode, but the transport controls can come in handy occasionally. Definitely not worth changing anything in Ardour that’d compromise support for “proper” control surfaces for the sake of devices like this.
That seems to be intentional (otherwise you could just use the MCP surface).
I think you may have to copy+edit the file. In particular you’ll have to override the “motorized” setting:
Even if support will be added to MCP in Ardour to ignore mismatched surface faders, it won’t happen before Ardour6.x which is still some time away. – Meanwhile I’ve confirmed that catching up with mismatched values works correctly with 5.12 and a m-audio device, so if you want it now… mapping it using generic-midi is your best choice.
Hey sciurius. I don’t want to derail the thread but since you’re here can you share your opinion on Zoom r24 as audio interface? Does it play nice with Gnu/Linux? Are all of those 8 inputs available as separate tracks when it is in interface mode?
And are you happy with it in general as a device? Any nasty drawbacks?
Oh, and is there a time/size limit of samples you can use per track or per project?
Quick hint for using MCP mode… if you set up a device file for an 8 fader device but tell it that the device is only 7 faders, the 8th fader should work as master. The thing is, that using the mcp protocol without some sort of banking and scribble strip is not really any use as banking requires scribble strips to be useful and a controller with only 7 or 8 strips tends to get too small really easy. I have a small session with 3 vocals, bass, 3 guitars (but the lead uses 3 strips for editing) and a “scratch” as well as one buss for reverb. So already 12 tracks of which mixing 11 is useful. That is no drums with the extra 8 to 16 strips that should have.
Oh and yes you can add scribble strips to the MCP… http://www.ovenwerks.net/software/mcpdisp.html
But that is linux only and requires jack at this time. Adding alsa is on the todo… if not very close to the top. If you are not using linux, I am pretty sure there are similar applets for mac and windows.
Thanks for all the information and suggestions! AFAICS there is very little to gain by using the R24 as a generic MIDI device instead of MCP, but there’s an awful lot to lose. So I’ll stick to MCP for the time being…
No doubt that may be true. However I do not have a proper map and I do not feel competent to create one.
Besides, even in generic MIDI, I cannot get the sliders to behave as desired.
I have cloned the bcf2000_mackie.map, set motorized to “no”, and in the preferences window set smoothing to 1. Still the ardour slider jumps immedeately to the R24 slider value when slightly moved.
The map describes the R24 subset of Mackie. Only the subset is R24 specific, everything else is standard Mackie. I would have thought there was a complete map for Mackie already so I could just strip it to R24 functionality, but I have not been able to find such a map.
As it is now, the R24 map is pretty useless since it is just what the R24 already does when Ardour uses Mackie protocol. Of course, you can use it as a starting point when you want to change behaviour.
Do not forget to subscribe to the Zoom forum, there’s a lot of interesting R24 information there.
Yes, but I assume it is possible to define complete Mackie support as a generic MIDI map. Or does the dedicated code do things that cannot be expressed in a midi map?
(Just asking)
Complete? no. That includes scribble-strip displays, level-meters, automation modes, mute/solo, selection, panners and panning modes… MCU is quite powerful
But for the case of the R24 which just has faders, I expect that you can (even with banking and dedicated master fader).