Ardour control from phone with Control

I have a working “map” for the android or iOS applet “Control”. (I have not tested this on an iOS device) To use this map in Ardour 5.1 and up you need to turn OSC on from the Control Surfaces page in perferences. Then open the OSC dialog. Select “Manual” for Port Mode and set the port to 8080. This what Control uses.

Assuming control is installed, open Control on your phone/tablet. Select from the menu “Destinations” and touch the + in the top corner. Add the the ip of the computer that Ardour is running on and the port (3819 is normal, but the OSC dialog lists the one in use). This will add it to the list.

Note: you will have to touch this address in the list each time you start Control to select it as active… Recent apps will bring it back as it was.

Next select from the menu “Interfaces”. Touch the + in the top corner and you will be asked for a url. The one to use www.ovenwerks.net/control/a-s-ctl.js
This will add Ardour controller (select) to the list and selecting this will take you to the simple control screen.

On the screen you will find transport buttons across the top. The left side has controls for the currently selected track: Record, Solo, Mute, level and a crude meter. The right side has two buttons to select the next or previous track with some text fields that show the session name, smpte time and bar beat. Below that there are three buttons. Connect sends an OSC message that sets up Ardour’s feedback, etc. so that Control and Ardour know how to talk to each other. Refresh re downloads the map from the original address. If it can’t connect… the screen will blank and you will need to select the interface locally again. The menu button shows Control’s menu across the bottom. These last two controls are not normally needed (maybe I should remove them)

Ardour in git has some OSC changes that will allow showing more than one channel and getting the buttons to work. Ardour 5.1-.4 was based on touchOSC and it’s needs but 5.5 will expand to work better with other OSC controllers like Control. I will have two new maps that take advantage of this. One that only shows recordable tracks and no buses no master and one that shows a bank of tracks (tablet mode).

It sometimes helps to hit Connect more than once or press and release slowly.

Control as an applet is not without problems, but it is free and open source and supports custom OSC messages. If there is someone who does android programming and would like to give Control some love, I would be happy to test and comment on things that need changing. (showing selected status of a button (and slider) only from OSC and not from local touch events for example)

What exactly is that “applet”? I couldn’t find anything in Google. How do I download/enable it?

Looks like http://charlie-roberts.com/Control/ (though I have not tested)

I’m getting “Could not load. Please try another URL” when downloading this file via Control, but my PC downloads it.

@alexthebassist, Could not load means it didn’t get a reply fast enough. Control seems to be picky, or wifi is harder or something. I have a local web server so that may help here. I know if my wifi is not working for a few seconds I get the same thing. As I said, I think Control could use some love, but it is the best (in terms of OSC abilities) I have found. It is better in this regard than the pay for things like touchOSC. If you can start a local server on your downloaded version that may help… let me see if I can find out where Control stores these files. I can’t find it so I don’t know how to do a direct load.

@lenovens, thanks for info. I downloaded the interface finally. Now I suspect what is the problem with Ardour and Control on my home network I ran into. It worked like a charm at work, but I still can’t manage it to connect to my personal laptop. According to your info, my router can be too slow for Control, which is kinda bizarre. Also, feedback seems to be dysfunctional: for example, I couldn’t get it to change fader position when switching active track. Not sure whose fault it is.

@alexthebassist I had that working here. So I am not sure. I have had some trouble with too much data at a time (both with Control and TouchOSC). The faders are not very nice in any case as they are jump to touch… not very nice for fine adjustment. I think my experiences with Control and TouchOSC make working on bundling OSC messages my next thing.

Thanks for this, I almost gave up on this. It works quite well except for the buttons that should switch from one track to another. Not sure why. However, I saw from a comparison of your file and the manual that only the global osc “commands” work. For the other ones that don’t work, I made new lines for them and used the address in this format “/access_action/action_name”

For example the button for recording with Count-In goes has this line…

“address” : “/access_action/Transport/RecordCountIn”