I picked up a Presonus Faderport for fairly cheap on a whim, figured as a midi device it would probably work fine.
But of course I’m hitting some stumbling blocks getting it to work in Ardour on my mac. (Haven’t tried it on my main linux box yet.) I’ve read the manual, but the “generic midi” section isn’t written yet. I read the parts for other devices anyway for ideas.
The FaderPort has the latest flash updates, and has been tested with Reaper on the same machine… it works just fine.
I’ve tried connecting it up to ardour with midi patchbay.app a number of different ways, primarily mapping to all of the following… ardour_in, ardour_out, control_in, and control_out. Oddly enough when I crank the fader up to the top, the solo for the main track comes on. Other than that, nothing.
I tried following some instructions for assigning controls manually, but ran into a “no middle button on this mac, and no 3-button mouse in the house” problem. So I don’t know if that’d work or not if I get another mouse.
I experimented with seeing if it’d work in “mackie” mode, even though as far as I can tell the mackie protocol it supports is a different one than the one that works with the BCF2000. (I’m fuzzy on this HUI vs MCP or whatever business.) I was suprised to discover I was able to eliminate the error message I’d get when choosing “mackie”, by making some linux vs mac guesses when editing ardour.rc. But I wasn’t suprised when it didn’t work anyway.
I have googled for more info… the only useful hit points to another thread here (http://ardour.org/node/1354 ) where it is said that something was “clarified on IRC”. I actually posted to that same thread, but for some reason it doesn’t show up as recent anywhere, and I later noticed it was under the linux section so I was semi-off-topic there anyway. So I’m reposting under mac instead.
So I have a handful of questions, hopefully simple ones.
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I’m not privy to whatever was clarified over irc… And am really curious. What was it?
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Am I getting anywhere close with my efforts? Just pointing me in the right direction would help.
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Is this product a likely dead end, or can it be made to work? I read on one hand that it is midi, and any midi gadget will work. But then I read other stuff about all kinds of problems with controllers.
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Should I just return it and grab something already known to work? It’s not too late for that yet… and it looks like support for the TranzPort and AlphaTrack are much better. (Or might be soon?) And the BCF2000 in Mackie mode looks excellent. A bit bigger than what I was wanting, but it might work for me fine. I have 3 “stations” I want to be able to work from (behind the drumkit, middle of room, and on the desk) but a 15ft combo power/usb cable might be all it takes to reach all of them. (That’s around the limit for usb, right?)
Lastly, I just read another post about generic midi for another device, and how to get around the middle-click thing on a mac. I’ll be trying that tonight…
Thanks!