The state of midi in Ardour3

[DoosC]

Hey guys !
I would like to have a little feedback from the community on how ardour3 is performing midi wise.
I have been hearing around that some of you did projects with a3. Was it audio only or also midi ? (I mean midi tracks not midi control of automation on audio tracks).
Has any of you make serious midi work with it ?
If so, which version, which distro ?

On my side, I have been playing with no luck with the 3.0 beta in KXStudio, 3.0 didn't make it better, neither 3.1.
The current version I have is 3.1-1+fixed1~precise1 from KXStudio repo.
Every time I try to use midi I receive nasty error messages like segfault, core dump, Unknown SMF error, etc. With always the same result: ardour crashes badly with midi. It keeps happening whether I try to import midi, double click on a midi track, try to draw notes on a midi track, etc.
My expectations were quite high regarding midi in ardour considering how much I loved the audio part of ardour.
As I have been quite disappointed for some months now, I would like to know if I am just out of luck for some reason or others had bad experiences.
I'm not so much of a tech guy so my mojo was to wait and see how it would improve versions after versions but surprisingly that didn't work so much as I expected

[Qualitymix]

actually I've been using MIDI in ardour 3 with much success, despite my having a low grade machine. I still manage to record my Alesis DM5 Pro with (almost) no latency, and can trigger many professional samples, while triggering bass samples, piano samples, soft synths like TAL Noisemaker...
In short, Ardour 3 is (in my mind) a very capable midi triggering program. Now I have run into issues with lack of menu options in changing details like velocity and so on...but as soon as you learn the hotkeys it's easy.

[danboid]

When I first tried A3 MIDI a few years ago, it was totally, utterly unusable. I couldn't believe they claimed A3 had MIDI support then - it wasn't really worth mentioning it was sooo buggy. However, back then it was the only FLOSS sequencer that nearly had graphical MIDI parameter automation so I helped the team (mainly Carl H.) get MIDI support to a usable state.

To cut a long story short, I need the ability to do gradual tempo changes and this isn't supported by A3 or qtractor. Rosegarden supports this but RG has v.poor plugin support and I do not like its interface. MusE can almost do what I want with tempo so until Muse matures I'm using Linux-compatible synths like Aspect and Noisemaker under REAPER, running under wine. That way I can realistically convert tracks between Windows and Linux based DAWs, so long as the tracks don't have gradual tempo changes!

If REAPER gets released natively for Linux, I'll switch to that if MusE doesn't serve my purposes sooner.

[Qualitymix]

In what way do you need the tempo to gradually change that you can't accomplish in Ardour 3? I guess I don't understand exactly what you mean. I've had no problems changing between various time signatures and tempos all from within Ardour 3. In fact, if I need to have a gradual tempo increase over say 4 bars, I can simply insert as many tempo changes I want until I get to my desired tempo.

[DoosC]

@Qualitymix : So you are using midi tracks with success, right ? Since which version ? And now which version are you using ?
Maybe it will help me to narrow the issue.

[Qualitymix]

Im just using the Ardour 3 available in falk's KXStudio repos. It works on my vanilla Ubuntu install on my laptop, and on my desktop which is KXStudio distro. Only problems I've ever had has been a reluctant sustain pedal and some notes not knowing how to shut off

[DoosC]

Im just using the Ardour 3 available in falk's KXStudio repos. It works on my vanilla Ubuntu install on my laptop, and on my desktop which is KXStudio distro. Only problems I've ever had has been a reluctant sustain pedal and some notes not knowing how to shut off

Thank you for your feedback. It gives me hope so I did some more testing.
A simple test that I even didn't think to make earlier : As a Cadence-addict, I always used to launch Ardour from Claudia's Application -> Add New. Now I tried something else, launching ardour "naked", namely -> run custom -> ardour3 instead. It then asks me to either open or create a new session. If I choose open and use a previous session -> same issue. But if I create a new session from the wizard... tada... it just works ! FalkTX any idea why ?

[Qualitymix]

I ran into the same problem actually. When trying to start a new project from Claudia, You cannot add Ardour as an app, and then start a new project from there. This is mainly because, as I found out from falkTX, Ardour doesn't support session managment other than NSM (non session manager, which I've never used).

What I do now for projects, is I don't even use Claudia. I only use Carla. If you start Carla and load your current project before you start Ardour, all of your connections will stay intact. So in a way its only one extra step compared to simply loading your primary DAW.

My thought on it is that LADISH wants to call a specific directory for loading its project files, and then Ardour can't write into the directory it wants because there is a conflict between the two. Again this is speculation, but no matter. Honestly with all of the progress falkTX has made with Carla, I personally see no need for session managment such as LADISH anymore.

I like to think of it this way...
I started out in a relationship with Claudia...
started flirting Carla...
had an affair...
now I've left Claudia for Carla and have been happy ever since .

[DoosC]

Since this seems to be a major issue, I'll try to fix it today and push an update.

Thanks ! By the way there is not need to rush as there is a workaround !

[f00bar]

I have found the following issues with MIDI in ardour3.3 in kxstudio:

• Newly inserted notes are not always saved (Bug)
• Quantization seems to move note off messages far away (Bug)
• Send all channels note-off is broken (Bug)
• It is not possible to insert choose MIDI program for a MIDI track (Missing feature)
• It is not possible to pan midi channels (Missing feature)

The two first are most critical. Program change can be managed via a MIDI-to-MIDI plugin as well as panning. The last one is really usefull when dumping two HW MIDI mono sounds to audio halfing the recording time.

Also I wonder if it is possible to lock automation to musical time instead of real time. About ardour3.3 itself: Inside LASH, it crashes every few editing event such as saving project.

[bazsound]

I recently tried to use Midi in ardour and found it horrible. Not crashes or anything, as it doesnt crash but im using 3.3 which i have paid a donation for (binary from ardours site).

What i find horrible is that you are drawing notes directly onto the track view, not like any other midi pragram where you create midi segments in the track view and double click which opens up the oh so familiar midi editor from the good ole days of cubase when i was back in college.

that has the keyboard and you pencil in notes which you can stretch and shrink to suit and theres a nice grid to keep you right.

[f00bar]

I found that the MIDI quantization bug appears when quantization is only done to note-on. When also quantization on note-off, it works.

[bazsound]

I got my head round midi in ardour and finally got used to it, got quite good at manually putting notes in and had half a song. But came up against quirks and bugs and crashes that i had to move to ardour 3.0

but then i found more bugs and cant finish the song i was working. I get notes at the beginning of regions disapear if i move the start of a region right up to the start of the note.

also now get edits to midi parts revert back to old versions even after saving.

Midi in ardour is unusuable even i fyou persist with it.

so i gave up, havent done anything in ardour for 3-4 days

[habbe]

I've got Ubuntu 13.04, KXstudio stuff and Ardour 3.3.

A3 sometimes crashes after export, sometimes the sound gets scrambled after a few hours of working (this might be a jack problem), some plugins will result into a crash. A few Drmr plugins will crash A3. Linuxsampler -plugin does not work. Also when I use Linuxsampler separately, and connect the midi tracks of A3 to that, I have weird crashes that seem random. The latest thing I've noticed is a warning in the log saying "untimed event" after which A3 will crash at random point, like after doing undo. After re-opening the session the midi I had been editing is in a weird state.

Just a few days ago I exported a midi-only song. After listening to the audio, it was missing notes. I re-opened the session, and the notes were there. I re-exported, and all was fine.

All in all it is very frustrating because of the crashes. I haven't been able to find a workflow.

[bazsound]

i wouldnt use ardour 3.3 for midi, too many problems to use it for anything worthwile at the moment.

As for the problems with plugins crashign ardour, that could be a plugin problem or it could be ardour.

use v3 if your wanting to try midi, though even that has some bugs but its atleast workable.

For the moment wait until new versions come out which should hopefully have most of the bugs worked out.

v3.3 has dbg at the end of the name when installed on my computer, seems to say that its a debug version.