Faderport8 vs. X-Touch Control, Control surfaces

Hello all, I’d like to grab a USB control surface for use with ardour (right now on v4, going to make the jump to 5 series soon)

Two of the top contenders I’ve seen - for my price range - are the PreSonus FaderPort8 and the Behringer X-Touch. I like these models as they have touch-sensitive, motorized faders. I want to use the faders as the actual mixing faders, as well as for parameter automation.

Does anyone have experience with either of these in ardour? Anything I should look out for?

The X-touch has the full complement of controls that the original Mackie Control does including one encoder per strip and a master strip. The fp8 does not have a master strip and has only one encoder that acts on the selected strip. These are things that can be seen just by looking at the pictures :slight_smile: I can’t say anything about quality of build, longevity or feel. Certainly the FP8 will benefit from specific code to be able to make the best use out of it.

We are working on FP8 support at present. The device uses large parts of Mackie Control Protocol, and so it somewhat functional in current ardour if you tell ardour that the device is (e.g.) a Mackie Universal Pro. But it will benefit from more dedicated support code because Presonus did not strictly follow MCP and added some extensions of their own to handle the displays.

The X-Touch is already supported as a Mackie Control Protocol device, and will show up as an device to choose if you enable Mackie Control support.

I will probably grab the x-touch :slight_smile: Thank you for your input paul and lenovens!