I was wrestling several issues but installing KXStudio solved everything. I can use my Zoom R8 as a control surface and an audio interface. The USB audio connection was easily done using the connection manager.
The only thing I had to install that didn’t (seem to) come with KXStudio was qjackctl. With that I was able to make the connection from my Zoom to Ardour on the MIDI tab of Connections. This allows all the Zoom R8 controls to come through and bind using the Ctrl-Middle and click on Ardour control.
Everything works great!
I would suggest anyone trying to do it the hard way should install KXStudio.
kx studio provides its own set of tools for managing jack. Look for cadence, that will allow yout o configure jack, and within cadence it has links to patchbays and session managers
AV Linux did the same for me. I am not recommending one over the other: the take-home-message is to use any proper audio/media configured distro if you just want to get some work done.
Not sure if they were using A2 or A3, I don’t believe Cadence manages ALSA midi connections for instance, so there is some situations QJackCTL is still needed for. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have it.
But yes using an AV focused distro will improve your experience significantly for most people.
About to take the jump and look again into preconfigured audio distros… After years of succesfully having rolled my own Gentoo, this weekend jack midi stopped routing … I can see the inputs but Gladish connections while they looked great, the MIDI data was not passing across interfaces. Worked with ALSA MIDI connections but not Jack… (which is pretty much required now)…
I’m going to try both KX and gentoostudio (as I’m not sure I could relinquish all the control I have with my current Gentoo)