I have a problem getting Ardour to respond to a Presonus FaderPort, single channel.
I have searched the forum and have only found stale threads.
I am using Ardour 5.12.0 that was bundled into Ubuntu Studio.
I have configured the FP according the the documentation under Edit>Preferences>Control Surfaces>Presonus FaderPort. Ardour does recognize the FP in and out channels.
I can see lots of MIDI data being send in both directions when I look at Window>MIDI Tracer, by toggling buttons/slider on the FP and also by using the mouse in the Ardour GUI.
There is a disconnect between the FP messages and the virtual sliders in the session.
Has anyone made this work?
Is this a configuration issue, or a defect?
I answered my own question - it DOES work. What I was missing it took was a firmware update. I had to plug it into a Windows system, and run the firmware update .exe from Presonus. Probably would have worked as well on a MAC. The executable took about 4 mins to run. The GUI explains how to initialize the device before it applies the new firmware:
unplug USB
plug in USB while holding down REW, STOP and REC keys at the same time
hit OK in the installer GUI and wait a few minutes
unplug and replug the USB cable
I reinitialized the box in Ardour on Linux, and it worked sure as snot.
If you have new Faderport (the black one with rubber buttons pictured below), Ardour6 has a dedicated “PreSonus Faderport v2” that works in native “Studio One” mode
Actually it should not be needed. The Firmware update is transferred as MIDI SysEx data. PreSonus has sent me those in the past while developing FaderPort 8/16 support for Ardour and Mixbus.
In general they have been very helpful and supportive!
