[Ardour-Users] Expanding the manual

[Tanjeff-Nicolai Moos]

Hi,

I'm quite new to ardour and want help expanding the users manual a bit
as I learn to use the software. In my opinion a good manual has great
impact on the usability and usefulness of a software and one of the
main problems with open source software is bad or non-existent
documentation. To do a good job, however, I need to understand the
concepts I want to document. In absence of good documentation I will
just ask this list ;-)

Currently I'm playing around with a Behringer BCF2000 control surface
(and MIDI in general). I learned a bit about MIDI, what Control
Changes, MTC and MMC are and so on. Although I got the BCF2000
basically working, some things are still unclear to me:

Ardour always generates three midi ports (control, seq, mcu). If I
remove one, it is recreated at next system start. What's the reason for
that and for what are the ports indented to do with?

In the Preferences window (Mod1-o) I can toggle "Trace Input" and
"Trace Output" for each midi port. What does this do?

If I assign faders, buttons, etc. to a control surface, this assignment
is stored in ~/.ardour2/ardour.rc. This file is not project-specific.
However, if I start a new project, the assignment doesn't work. I can
re-assign the controls in that project, however. Are the assignments
saved on a per-project-basis?

In the "Options"->"Control Surfaces" menu are some options that I don't
understand:
- Remote ID assigned by user/follows mixer/follows editor
  I assume this means internal identifiers for faders/buttons etc.
- Auto-Rebind controls
- Mackie
  Are Mackie surfaces somewhat special? I don't know them.


That were my questions so far. When I understand them, I will try to
update the manual accordingly.

Happy new year for all!

Tanjeff