This is a protip I just discovered. Out of curiosity, I connected two midi devices “APKmini2” (which I leave on my desk) and TSMIDI2 “Midi Commander” (which is a foot switch I leave on my floor). I’m happy to find that I can manually connect both to the “MIDI Control In” port of Ardour with Jack connections. I can even use the same setup for the buttons, each of them have 8 buttons configured as “Prog Change” 0 to 7. And so I’ve setup to be able to do play, stop, and record-enable as being able to control either with my foot or with my hand on my desk:
Though one thing to note, Ardour’s GUI for Generic MIDI control surface config only displays one of the two MIDI devices for “Incomming MIDI On”, even though can use jack to get messages from two devices: