Midi Help Ardour 5 - Ubuntu 18.04

I have tried Ardour a few times through the years & never could get everything working. My audio is working fine in Ardour but I can’t get midi to work at all. I don’t know if it has something to do with jack or what but I just downloaded Rosegarden & my midi works fine right out of the box with no tweaking. I have an external midi keyboard controller that I use for recording midi & an external sound module so I’m not trying to get any synth sounds in the program at least for now. I have started Ardour both ways by using Alsa(which shows my MAudio Audiophile) & by using Jack & neither way can I record midi. I’m assuming there is something simple that I’m missing but I have no clue. Any help appreciated.

The simple thing might be just assigning the MIDI controller to the track you wish to record. You say that you have external sound modules but I am assuming that’s not the problem (because those should just have audio routed into your Audiophile, no MIDI necessary as far as Ardour is concerned).
For recording MIDI, when you start a new session or open an existing one you will first have the Audio/MIDI setup dialog. In the bottom right corner of that dialog there is a button labeled “MIDI Device Setup”. When you click on that box, do you see your MIDI keyboard controller? If not go back to the dialog, and change “ALSA Raw Devices” to “ALSA Sequencer” and check again. Let me know whether or not your device is at least recognized by Ardour and we can go from there.

Thanks,
It does show the Audiophile & now I got the midi working if I don’t use jack. I didn’t know I had to select the Audiophile under Midi on the left every time I want to record on a midi track. So now the only problem I have is figuring out how to get midi with Jack. Jack doesn’t show the audiophile at all. I’ve heard that there people are having more x runs with Alsa than with Jack so I’d like to get Jack working with Ardour.

You heard wrong. JACK does use ALSA under the hood, and Ardour/ALSA (no JACK) is a tad more efficient (since there no middle layer Ardour <-> JACK <-> ALSA).

You only need JACK if you want to route audio between applications, or want to use 3rd party audio software alongside with Ardour.

I know you can’t believe everything you read on the web but when i did a Google search for “Jack vs. ALSA” that is where I got my info. Back when Ardour didn’t have midi I used Jack to sync Ardour with Rosegarden but it looks like there is no need any more. So am I correct that without using Jack, I should be able to run plenty of audio tracks along with midi tracks in Ardour with no problem assuming the specs of my computer are good enough?
I used to use Cakewalk & had quite a large sample library. some were Vst’s & some Kontakt instruments. I’d love to be able to use them but I guess I’ll start another thread about that.