Tally-Light, Recording-Light

Is there a way to connect an external red recording light (tally-light, on-air…) to ardour? Possibly via MMC, Ardouino, etc.? It might help during orchestral recording sessions.

@th0m: OSC is able to send a message when master record is enabled. (midi too for that matter) I am not sure about USB to serial adaptors (with a laptop) but most desktop mother boards still have serial or parallel port on them somewhere. It is possible to set individual lines high or low… you would need a driver for your light. However, master record enable does not mean we are recording for sure and in some cases may come and go for things like punch in/out. You almost want to track any record enable for any track. This is all possible but requires some middleware to put it all together. I like the idea and think I may add /record_tally output to OSC (won’t be for a while though).

OSC is a network protocol and an Android tablet or iPad could be used as the On-Air light with one big button/LED/label that filled the screen. (wireless) or a RaspberryPi (wired network) has available OSC libs and could run a lamp. These are probably the two cheapest methods of doing things. (9inch Androids are as cheap as $60CAN)

Note: this is not the same as on-air. In the case of TV, on-air is determined downstream by master control rather than the studio in question anyway, and in radio on-air is specific to one or more inputs and not others. One could watch for strip mutes… but Ardour is probably not suited for such a use. IDJC would probably make more sense for that and has the ability to run shell script on individual mic open/close events.

Look for /record_tally in Ardour 5.0 (it was easier than I thought).

Dear Lenovens!
Thank you so much for your answer and your effort!! I’m looking forward to see the source code of this file, just couldn’t find the ardour5 sources during this night. In case you choose the alternative via COM/LPT and its DTR/RTS-register, it would be really easy to hook up a logic level MosFET IRLxx and an old-fashioned light bulb, preferred for glowing calmly in front of the conductor.
Again thank you very much!

@th0m All the ardour source code can be found here…

Which is a mirror of the actual Ardour repo. It has all the appropriate branches etc, including lenovens’ osc branch. He hasn’t pushed the exact change he is talking about into it yet, but I would expect it to show up there.

    Seablade

@seablade @lenovens Thank you very much for your help! After cloning serveral times and searching for the filename I gave up. So I’m curious about lenovens solution. Have a nice weekend!

I am waiting for the VCA2 branch to be merged into master because the change is against that branch.