[ardour-users] Control surfaces

[Jesse Chappell]

George Chan wrote on Mon, 29-Mar-2004:

 > I just joined this list about 2 weeks ago, and I am
 > wondering what mixers and/or control surfaces people are
 > using successfully with Ardour. 
 > 
 > I was originally looking at either the Tascam DM-24 or the
 > Yamaha 01V96 mixers with an RME sound card. But since most
 > of my mixing will be done on the computer, it would make
 > more sense to just buy a control surface.  I looked at the
 > Tascam FW-1884
 > http://www.tascam.com/product_info.php?pid=269      and I
 > was wondering if it would work with Ardour.  It seems to
 > have a good "bang for the buck". 
 
Currently ardour does not yet have full native support for moving
fader control surfaces.  It does have MMC support and any fader
can be bound to any incoming MIDI CC.   I know that Ron Parker
(from the SOS article) uses a DM-24 for MMC control, but I'm pretty
sure he does most mixing on DM-24 instead of controlling ardour.

The FW-1884 looks like quite an interesting device for Ardour/Linux
to work on supporting, because it emulates both the HUI and the
Mackie Control surfaces (as well as being a firewire audio interface).
In addition, you should note that
there is no real support for any firewire audio interfaces in ALSA
yet, but this is only the case because no one has yet dedicated
the time and/or resources for it to happen.   I personally would
love to see work done (or even participate) on this front, but
this will likely only happen if someone donates or lends some
of these devices to the interested developers.


 > When I build my audio only computer, it will be either a
 > dual or quad AMD CPU with about 1 gig of RAM. 

Of course this will be more than sufficient, but cooling and noise will be your
primary problem with such a system (unless you have a machine
room away from your recording area :).
 
 > I cannot afford to make a serious mistake on my hardware
 > purchases, so, I have to get it right the first time.  I'll
 > be starting this project from scratch, so I don't have any
 > VST plugins to worry about. 

If you stick with RME or M-Audio audio hardware, you will be in good
shape.

jlc