Palette Gear

Has anybody tried these on a Linux system? Supposedly they support MIDI, so I’m hoping it would be as simple as just plugging it in.

That looks like a wonderful setup. It is a bit pricey for audio work as compared to the fader port for example which is cheaper than than the expert kit while having much more functionality and closer integration with Ardour.

So price aside, this should work in midi mode directly with Ardour. That means if you are running Ardour on a mac or windows it would be no problem in generic midi mode. If you are running Linux, things are more difficult. There would be no midi driver or map maker. I do not know how this shows up in Linux and so how hard it would be to use it. That from what I can see on the website, there are no downloadable manuals or specs to look at. So it is hard to know exactly. Again the documentation on the web site is very thin, so without plugging it in, one can’t tell if it actually provides a midi port with some sort of default mapping or if it relies on some sort of “on your computer” middleware that maps from HID or whatever to MIDI.

If it expects middleware then it would be possible to create a pallet Gear to MIDI mapper, however, it might be nicer to make a Pallet Gear module for Ardour using libusb (I think that is what it is called) so that it would be usable in any OS. I think anyone who could make PG to midi middleware could make controller module Ardour.