[ardour-dev] Using USB-HID-devices in Ardour

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Steve Harris hat gesagt: // Steve Harris wrote:

> Agreed, very strongly. I own a griffin powermate (not actually that good
> for ardour control) and nearly bought a shuttlepro on thursday.

I was considering the Powermate for quite some time, but always
thought it to be a bit limited. Then I discovered the ShuttleXpress,
(half the price of the ShuttlePro) exactly on Thursday, and ordered it
immediatly (an impulse buy by the book).  Seems I found the fastest
supplier, because I had it in my hands on Friday! And now I'm tempted
to buy another one, for comfortable and realistic laptop DJing.
("I must not buy another one!", "I must not buy another one!", "I must
not buy another one!",...) 

It does not work on my Via mainboard, though, so be careful. 

Do you use the powermate kernel module with your wheel? I wonder, what
it does?

> One option might be to write HID -> MIDI+JACK Transport translator
> programs for them, which would be a bit more general than specific ardour
> drivers. Though I'm not sure how practical that is, and if it would be
> lossy. Doing shuttle in JACK trnasport would be tricky.

The ShuttleXpress regularily sends the current Jog wheel position
every 5 seconds or so, a value in the range 1-255 (you need several
turns to walk through the whole range), and of course sends it
immediatly when moved. The Shuttle ring sends values ranging from 1 to
7 and from -1 to -7. It does not seem to send its zero position. There
is a "linuxevent" object in Pd, available in the Pd-CVS, which could
be used to immediatly translate the events to Midi CC, so one could
already use it in Ardour by making a virmidi-connection. But of course
it would be nicer to have it directly in Ardour or in Jack transport.
There also is a project called "evrouter", which translates HID events
to X windows events. 

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__