I recently took delivery of a faderport. I can report that it worked straight away using Alsa directly from Ardour. However, I normally use Ardour via jack because I use Hydrogen. I did manage to get it working via jack by using a2jmidid but it is a messy process. I wonder if I am missing something?
I must add that I love the faderport. The ergonomics of single-handed recording have improved dramatically. Thank you.
If you use a recent version of Jack1 (not sure about Jack2) the alsa midi devices appear in jack midi under “alsa_midi”, that is to say a2jmidid functionality has be built into Jack. Alternatively, you can just autostart a2jmidid using command line, QJackCtl, or Cadence. Also, I think once you configure Ardour to use your faderport Ardour will remember the connections so you should only have to configure once. I would think you could define an Ardour template using your faderport, so that all your Ardour sessions can be set up to use it.
Actually, the Faderport configuration (and that of all control surfaces) is above/outside session setup, so once you’ve set things up for a particular surface, it will/should stay that way for all future (new) sessions.