[ardour-dev] support for frontier design tranport

[Paul Davis]

On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 19:50 +0200, Markus Hein wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> it was very interesting news for me, to read  about the coming support for
> the
> frontier tranzport control.
> 
> I just wonder a little bit about the implementation of  the driver etc.  for
> supporting this
> device under linux. will it be exclusive integrated deep inside of ardour,
> or are there plans for
> a implementation layer which makes it easy to implement tranzport-control
> also for other jack-app's ?
> 
> maybe there is already support for this device under linux, but i did not
> read about it.

tranzport.sf.net contains a single source file that has everything
anyone needs to do anything they want with the tranzport. the device is
so easy to use ... the hard part is deciding how best to present it to
the user rather than figuring out how to communicate/control it.

i do not have the time, and frankly i don't have the desire either, to
map the tranzport's low level USB command protocol into MIDI the way
they did for win and os/x DAWs. i think they had to do it that way to
make it visible to those DAWs, since they had no concept of non-MIDI
control surface support for 3rd party h/w. i don't doubt that it can be
useful for many people, but i don't have the time or focus to do that.

in ardour, we use the USB-level communication protocol that arthur
"documented" in his example source code. its done as shared library that
is linked against libardour at this time, and dynamically loaded by
ardour. the same design has also been adopted for "generic MIDI" control
surfaces (ones that send just MIDI CC and note on/off commands, not
sysex).

--p