maxBreakwell.com

After too long a delay I finally fin­ished my first ver­sion of a TouchOSC based trans­port for Ardour. One of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of this project was the sheer num­ber of Ardour’s func­tions that can be con­trolled via OSC. Deciding what to incor­po­rate into the lay­out and what to leave out took hours of con­sid­er­a­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion. I tried to keep every­thing as stream­lined as pos­si­ble only using using func­tions in my lay­out that I thought would be of the most use.

As I dis­cussed in my pre­vi­ous post, you will need to run Max5 patch in the back­ground to allow bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion between TouchOSC and Ardour. Please go ahead and down­load the .zip file which con­tains the TouchOSC lay­out, .max­pat file, and a .mxf file as well.  Even if you don’t own Max/Msp/Jitter, the patch should work fine using the Max/Msp run­time ver­sion, which is free to download.

First, run the Max5 patch and you’ll see a very bor­ing screen that looks like this:

Like the win­dow says, there isn’t much to do other than to just run it in the back­ground and have fun, but there are a few things to be aware of. Make sure TouchOSC is using the cor­rect ports. You can change them in the patch win­dow or on your iPhone/iPod Touch. If you are using your home’s wifi inter­net con­nec­tion you prob­a­bly won’t have to change the Ardour IP adress or the iPhone IP address, but if you setup a direct net­work between your com­puter and iPhone then you will have to change these addresses in the patch window.

The labels on the TouchOSC lay­out should be fairly self-explanatory, but I’ll show a pic­ture here of each page and briefly describe what every­thing does.

Page 1 (dis­played above)

Play — Toggles the play button

Loop — Toggles the Loop but­ton for play­back and recording

Rec — Toggles the trans­port Record but­ton (In order to actu­ally record to a track, that track must also be record enabled)

Red Fader — This will con­trol level of what­ever track is listed first in the edi­tor view

Add mark — This will add a mark at the loca­tion off the playhead

Prev. Mark & Next Mark — Moves the play­head to the pre­vi­ous or next mark

Stop — Stops play­back and recording

Start & End — Moves the play­head to the Start or End marker

RW — Rewinds Track

FF — Fast Forwards Track

Red Dial — Scrubbing

Save, Undo, & Redo — Saves file, undoes the last action, redoes the last undo

Page 2

Punch In – Toggles the abil­ity to use a Punch In marker while recording

Punch Out — Toggles the abil­ity to use a punch Punch Out marker while recording

Nudge — These two but­tons will nudge the play­head back or for­ward by the amount of time selected in the Snap Mode sec­tion of the trans­port. I believe the default amount of time is 5 seconds

Snap Modes – Scroll through the options: Grid, No Grid, or Magnetic

Snap Choice — Scroll through the var­i­ous grid sub­di­vi­sion options: CD Frames, SMPTE frames, SMPTE sec­onds, SMPTE mintues, sec­onds, mintues, Beats/32, Beats/16, Beats/8, Beats/4, Beats/3, Beats, Bars, Marks, Region Starts, Region Ends, Region Syncs, Region Bounds

Edit Point — Scrolls through the options: play­head, marker, mouse

Toggle Visual State — You can use this mul­ti­tog­gle to save up to 12 unique grid views. With one of the tog­gles in the “on” posi­tion press the Save State but­ton and the cur­rent visual state will be saved on that tog­gle but­ton. You can then switch between saved visual states eas­ily in your project.

Global Record — This but­ton record enables all of the tracks. It would be nice if press­ing it again would dis­able all of them as well, but unfor­tu­nately that not how this OSC com­mand works with Ardour. What you see is what you get with this one.

Page 3

This page allows you to con­trol the zoom­ing para­me­ters of your project. The pur­ple focus but­tons mod­ify what Ardour will in zoom on. For exam­ple, press­ing the mouse but­ton, then repeat­edly press­ing the green In but­ton would zoom closer in on the loca­tion of the mouse cursor.

In — Zooms In

Out – Zooms Out

Session — Sets the zoom so that the entire ses­sion can be viewed in the edi­tor window

Region — Sets the zoom so that the selected region can be viewed in the edi­tor window

RegionXY — *Use with cau­tion* Sets the zoom so that the selected region fills the entirety of the edi­tor win­dow. The dan­ger­ous part is that I haven’t found and effec­tive method of get­ting the screen back to nor­mal. Pressing the Session or Region but­tons won’t do the trick, but if you have saved a visual state you can get back by using the appro­pri­ate mul­ti­tog­gle button.

*I rec­om­mend using the 1^st visual state to save the ses­sion view. This way you can use the RegionXY func­tion and still get back to normal.*

Toggle – Toggles between the cur­rent and pre­vi­ous visual state

Center – Centers the play­head in the edi­tor window

Playhead – Sets the Zoom Focus to the loca­tion of the playhead

Mouse – Sets the Zoom Focus to the loca­tion of the mouse cursor

Edit – Sets the Zoom Focus to the edit location

Page 4

Set Loop Edit Range – Sets the loop points to the area selected in the edi­tor window

Set Loop Region – Sets the loop points to the region selected in the edi­tor window

Set Punch Edit Range – Sets the Punch In/Punch Out mark­ers to the area selected in the edi­tor window

Set Punch Region – Sets the Punch In/Punch Out mark­ers to the region selected in the edi­tor window

Two Green Play Buttons – These but­tons are a lit­tle con­fus­ing, and some­times a lit­tle unre­li­able, but I still found them very use­ful. The top but­ton will play from the mouse cur­sor posi­tion to the end marker, and then, move the play­head back to a selected edit point. The bot­tom but­ton will play from the mouse cur­sor posi­tion to a selected edit point, or, from the selected edit point to the mouse cur­sor posi­tion. Understand? Just try it out while your edit­ing some files. I found that it helped me out quite a bit.

Split – Splits a region file at the edit location

Crop – Crops a region to the selected area in the edi­tor window

Raise – Raises the region above any other regions that may be over­lap­ping on the same track

Lower – Lowers the region beneath any other regions that may be on the same track

Export – Opens the options menu for export­ing the selected region

Naturalize – Moves the Region back to its orig­i­nal position

Normalize – Increases the ampli­tude of the region to its high­est level before dis­tor­tion occurs

Reverse – Reverses the region’s audio file

That’s about it every­thing. I did my best to cre­ate this lay­out with only the most use­ful com­mands, grouped together by page depend­ing on what func­tions I though might be used together the most.

After using this lay­out last night for a few hours I felt good about my cre­ation, but I do believe that I would like to make some adjust­ments and upgrades along the way. If there is any­thing that you feel is par­tic­u­larly good, or awk­ward about this TouchOSC lay­out, let me know and I’ll take every­thing into con­sid­er­a­tion for the next ver­sion I get around to making.

Until then, I hope that every­one enjoys using Ardour and TouchOSC together while edit­ing and record­ing music!

Tags: ardour, cycling 74, daw, digital media, free, jack os, linux, mac, Max/Msp, max5, Music, open source, osc, Software, TouchOSC, transport