[Ardour-Users] BCF2000 with MIxBus channel strip mode?

[Rudy Sanchez]

Hello everyone...

I've been reading here and noticed a lot of interest in an iPad controller- would love to hear about AC7 users real world experiences with iPad and Ardour/Mixbus. 

In the meantime there's work to be done, so I picked up a Behringer BCF2000 8-fader controller. The BCF's Mackie mode works great with Mixbus - provided that you can live with the limited implementation (I couldn't get many of the shift functions to work, such as eq or aux sends). But I really was hoping to have functionality that resembled my Yamaha 02R console, where I can select a channel and then all that channel strip's parameters are accessible through a single layer of knobs and switches. 

Behringer's BC mode allows me to manually map most of the MixBus channel strip elements, but there aren't enough controls on the BCF to assign all the MixBus channel strip elements for eight channels. What's needed is a second layer of functionality; for example being able to select one of the push buttons over each fader, which would then assign all 8 encoders (with 4 encoder groups) to the selected MixBus channel. Unfortunately after reading through the BCF's MIDI implementation data all I got was a headache and still no idea how to pull this off. Has anyone ever tried to do this with Ardour/Mixbus? Or should I just forget it and add a BCR2000 which has 32 hardware encoders? Oh wait... wouldn't I need the BCR to switch to a new preset every time I selected a channel on the BCF? Wouldn't that limit me to 32 MixBus channels since the BCR only has 32 presets?

Rudy