3 title: Using the Presonus Faderport
4 menu_title: Presonus Faderport
7 <img align="left" alt="A picture of a Presonus Faderport device" src="/images/faderport-ssmall.png">
9 Since version 4.5, Ardour has had full support for the Presonus
10 Faderport. This is a compact control surface featuring a single
11 motorized fader, a single knob (encoder) and 24 buttons with fixed
15 <h2>Connecting the Faderport</h2>
17 The Faderport comes with a single USB socket on the back. Connect a
18 suitable USB cable from there to a USB port on your computer. As of
19 the end of 2015, you should avoid USB3 ports - these cause erratic
20 behaviour with the device. This issue might get fixed by Presonus in
24 Ardour uses the Faderport in what Presonus calls "native" mode. You
25 do not need to do anything to enable this - Ardour will set the
26 device to be in the correct mode. In native mode, the Faderport
27 sends and receives ordinary MIDI messages to/from the host, and the
28 host understands the intended meaning of these messages. We note
29 this detail to avoid speculation about whether Ardour supports the
30 device via the HUI protocol - it does not.
32 The Faderport will be automatically recognized by your operating
33 system, and will appear in any of the lists of possible MIDI ports
34 in both Ardour and other similar software.
37 To connect the Faderport to Ardour, open the Preferences dialog, and
38 then click on "Control Surfaces". Click on the "Enable" button
39 in the line that says "Faderport" in order to activate Ardour's
40 Faderport support. Then double click on the line that says
41 "Faderport". A new dialog will open, containing (among other things)
42 two dropdown selectors that will allow you to identify the MIDI
43 ports where your Faderport is connected.
45 <img alt="the Faderport configuration dialog" src="foo">
47 Once you select the input and output port, Ardour will initialize
48 the Faderport and it will be ready to use. You only need do this
49 once: once these ports are connected and your session has been
50 saved, the connections will be made automatically in this and other
53 You do not need to use the power supply that comes with the
54 Faderport but without it, the fader will not be motorized. This
55 makes the overall experience of using the Faderport much less
56 satisfactory, since the fader will not move when Ardour tells it
57 to, leading to very out-of-sync conditions between the physical
58 fader position and the "fader position" inside the program.
61 <h2>Using the Faderport</h2>
63 The Faderport's controls can be divided into three groups:
65 <li>Global controls such as the transport buttons</li>
67 <li>Controls which change the settings for particular track or
70 <li>Controls which alter which track or bus is modified by the
71 per-track/bus controls.</li>
75 Because the Faderport has only a single set of per-track controls,
76 by default those controls operate on the first selected track or
77 bus. If there is no selected track or bus, the controls will do
81 <h3>Transport Buttons</h3>
83 The transport buttons all work as you would expect.
86 <dd>Starts the transport moving backwards. Successive presses
87 speed up the "rewind" behaviour.
89 If pressed while also holding the Stop button, the playhead will
90 return to the zero position on the timeline.
93 <dd>Starts the transport moving faster than normal. Successive presses
94 speed up the "fast forward" behaviour.
98 Stops the transport. Also used in combination with the Rewind
99 button to "return to zero".
103 Starts the transport. If pressed while the transport is
104 already rolling at normal speed, causes the playhead to jump to
105 the start of the last "roll" and continue rolling ("Poor man's
108 <dt>Record Enable</dt>
109 <dd>Toggles the global record enable setting
114 <h3>Other Global Controls</h3>
134 <h3>Per-track Controls</h3>
145 <dt>Knob/Dial/Encoder</dt>
158 <h3>Track Selection Controls</h3>
161 <dt>Left (arrow)</dt>
164 <dt>Right (arrow)</dt>
172 The "Bank" button is currently not used by Ardour