MIDI Instrument Management in Ardour3

Paul - Question on your plans for Ardour3.

Do you plan to include MIDI instrument management? Basically the ability to add instruments (e.g. Roland JV-1080) and have the banks/patches mapped to their instrument names? (And theoretically the ability to add/export instrument definitions).

I know Rosegarden has this ability… I haven’t explored other commercial DAWs to see if it’s included there as well, but it really would excellent to have.

Mark

@griphiam: we already have all that. Ardour3 can use instrument definition files etc. etc. I havcen’t tested it much myself, since such functionality doesn’t really interest me, but it was added early last year and tested back then. I’m not sure that the current state of the GUI interaction with it is really so great, but the core functionality is all there.

@paul – Awesome… I wasn’t able to track it down via the GUI, but then I wasn’t sure it was there to begin with. I’ll try harder to see what I can find.

Thanks!

@paul – Well, I just did an update and dug through all the UI that I could possibly get to (menus & right click context). When you expand a MIDI track you have buttons for the channels 1-16, but I can find nothing that lets you specify what instruments are mapped to those channels.

Let me know if you happen to remember which class in the code was supposed to handle that and I can take a peek to see if I’m just missing it or if it’s just not accessible via the UI at the moment.

Additionally, for whatever reason the Theme Manager doesn’t seem to be working… Ardour3 starts up in the Light Theme, and toggling between Dark and Light doesn’t change anything.

Let me know if this forum isn’t the right place for Ardour3 feedback (understandable since you’re still working on it…) If it’s not, let me know where else you’d prefer.

Mark

@griphiam: the theme switch issue is specific to Ardour on OS X, and was just solved yesterday. I don’t recall how program changes etc. are handled in the GUI, so I’ll have to get back to you about that.

@paul – I am actually running on linux (latest Kubuntu) where I was seeing the issue. I’ll do an update when I get home to see if what you did for OS X fixes it in linux as well.

@griphiam: i have no idea why or how this could happen on linux.

@paul – Figured it out. I didn’t have gtk2-engines installed. After installing that, all the theming works.

@paul – I definitely think there are bunch of missing UI elements from the current svn version. Looking around, I found the following screenshot (http://www.flickr.com/photos/24012642@N02/3130259956/) that Hans Baier took. Those context menus and the combo boxes above the 4x4 grid do not appear.

Right clicking on program changes reveals a 2 px tall empty context menu (so obviously there intended to be one but the elements are removed).

I can’t find screenshots of menus or dialogs that support instrument definition, but this one (http://www.flickr.com/photos/24012642@N02/3094346093/) implies support for the MIDINAM instrument definition files, but unfortunately, I don’t see anything on how it was used in the UI.

I don’t know if that’s helpful or not, but it at least shows that support existed at one point, and it’s just not there/not available now.

Mark

@griphiam: i’ve been focused on getting this all working again over the last couple of days. i’m not quite done yet. rest assured that its all there, there were just some bugs, some misdesigns and some thinkos in the whole scheme.

Awesome =) I look forward to it.