How can I control both ardour and plugins with a single midi controller? I have many unused controls on my launchcontrol xl and I would like to control a plugin with my unused controls.
Using jack I can control many programs with the same midi controller. But within ardour I can’t find out how. I have configured the ardour to be controlled from the launchcontrol xl, and that works. But I want to control any of the calf plugins, which can be controlled outside of ardour together with other programs easily using jack. But when I use these plugins in ardour, I can’t figure how to get them to recieve the midi commands from the launchcontrol xl.
Maybe it’s plain simple to do, but I’ve spent four hours trying already. It can’t be that difficult so I must be daft!
By the way, at the moment the ony way I can get it to work is having the calf plugin open outside of ardour and connect it all up using jack. That works, but it’d be a huge mess as soon as you have a few plugins.
To use a generic MIDI control surface to control plugins with their own GUI, right-click the plugin in the channel strip and choose ‘Edit with generic controls…’; then you can assign MIDI controllers to plugin parameters with <Ctrl>+middle-click.
Please note that we STRONGLY advise against using the CALF plugins. These days they are still the #1 or #2 source of crashes and problems with Ardour, no matter how much the developers or some CALF uses claim they have improved. When they work, they work well. When they fail, they crash Ardour.
Also, see the manual section on MIDI binding maps. http://manual.ardour.org/using-control-surfaces/midi-binding-maps/
Thank you very much. Fantastic stuff. I new it had to be easy.
Even if it’s a bit off-topic, and just out of curiosity, if you discourage the use of calf plugins, which others do you recommend instead? Calf have a fantastic collection in one bundle that sound pretty good and are quite feature rich. What equivalents are there out there? I have years of experience with many different audio apps, all running together with jack as the core. I haven’t really had many problems, but now that you mention it, I had a problem recently and I did suspect that either the jack patchbay or one particular calf plugin were the culprit (the sidechain compressor IIRC). But I have quite a few audio programs all going at the same time so it’s very hard for an end user like me to debug the problem correctly.
This forum and all of it’s members are proving to be VERY HELPFUL INDEED. Probably the best forum I’ve been to in a very long time, or maybe ever. Thank you for your help and great work.
