[ardour-users] MMC commands and remote control

[Gerhard Zintel]

Hello List,

I'm new here and no native speaker - so, be patient ;-]

I'm on my way to assemble a small remote control for Ardour using an ATMEL 
mega8 micro controller and a few electronic components (price about 10 Euro). 
In a first step I'd like to start and stop Ardour, jump to the begin or end 
of the session and switch record mode on/off.

I'm using MMC commands over MIDI cable and I realized that some of them are 
working like expected, others not. So far the comands STOP, PLAY, 
FAST_FORWARD and REWIND are working well. 

Jumping to the begin or end of the session is more complex.The begin of the 
session normally is the location 0:0:0:0:0 so I can use the LOCATE comand. I 
normally don't know the location of the end of the session so I have no idea 
how to solve this. 

The main problem is to toggle the Rec-Enable button (is this the name for the 
button with the red circle?). I have played with the RECORD_STROBE (punch in) 
and RECORD_EXIT (punch out) commands. The last one works also well (switching 
record mode off during recording) but sending a RECORD_STROBE command starts 
Ardour to go into play mode. Sending the command again a second time a little 
later starts recording. But if I send the command directly two times out of 
the controller one after each other don't do the same thing. Obviously there 
must been a (short?) time delay between the two RECORD_STROBE commands.

That is especially unusable because Ardour runs always a short time in play 
mode before it starts recording. So I'm eg. not able to start recording from 
the very beginning. Maybe its a bug and I should file it or I'm 
missunderstanding the meaning of RECORD_STROBE command.

Is there any other MMC command to switch to rec-enable mode before I start 
playing/recording?

Another wish is to toggle the "per track rec-enable" buttons remotely. I'd 
like to start the recording remote, jumping back to the beginning of the file 
and play it again, but as long as the per track rec-enable buttons are 
pressed, those tracks are not audible :-( The MIDI bindable things in Ardour 
seems to be the sliders only - at least in my version.

every help would be greatly appreciated

Gerhard

PS.: if anyone is interested in the hard-/software of the remote controll - 
I'd like to share that knowledge. A WIKI would be the best for sharing those 
kind of information - or what would you think?

PPS.: I'm using Ardour 0.9beta24. I was not able to compile the beta26 version 
under DEBIAN Sarge.