Hello, I am trying to set up Zoom R8 as a Control Surface for Ardour 8.6.0/Linux. Selecting Mackie Control, Master fader starts working straight away. However, other controls, like Track Faders and buttons, won’t work unless I add a VCA track. Found this by pure chance.
Is this a supposed behavior? I know very little of VCA, and I don’t configure it in any way, it appears to be working as a catalyst of sorts. What’s more, even if I delete this dummy VCA Track, all controls keep working as they should. What is this VCA magic, and what I am missing here? Thanks.
Sounds like a bug, but not sure where, considering other Mackie surfaces work fine (Or noone has reported issues yet) I would suspect the R8 does something a bit screwy with their Mackie Control support though sadly.
I have a Zoom R8 and I just tested using it as a Control Surface.
I put the Zoom R8 in USB->Audio Interface mode and in Ardour’s Preferences → “Control Surfaces” I enabled “Mackie”, clicked on “Show Protocol Settings” and selected “Mackie Universal Pro” as “Device Type” and under “Surface sends via” I selected the “Zoom R8 MIDI” dvice.
I am now able to control the track volume using faders 1-8 and their solo/mute/rec status, depending on what is selected on the Zoom R8 in the lower left corner of the display.
The master fader of the Zoom controls the volume of Ardour’s Monitor section and the Master track’s output was automatically routed to the monitor section. Open the Mix view to see the monitor section controls in Ardour. Unfortunately the Zoom R8 doesn’t provide any buttons to control the monitor section’s solo or mute status.
I can also control the play-head with arrow buttons and the dial on the R8 and the transport buttons work as well.
In a nutshell, everything seems to work as it should.
Thanks for thorough description. Most of it matches my actions, only I believe I was fiddling with Audio and MIDI routing on an existing project, which could have probably be the root cause.
Anyway, I have tried anew, turned Zoom R8 on and switched it into Audio Interface mode, then created a new empty project, added a handful of tracks and voila! everything works like a charm, including muting/soloing and transport and jog wheel just as you have described.