mauriziob/ardouvy

ArdouVy is a Kivy project to control Ardour via OSC

ArdouVy

ArdouVy is a remote controller for the Ardour DAW based on the Kivy library, and allows basic support for DAW operations via OSC support. It was developed with musician needs in mind, so the user can stay in his place while playing his instrument and control what he/she needs to. Please note that this is still a beta/debug release, intended just for testing and still not complete. Don't yell at me, it's still a work in progress and, much more important, I'm a musician, not a programmer :)

What does it do?

• List all the tracks/busses in the current section, with Mute/Solo toggles and RecEnable for tracks;
• Control the main fader and [aux] sends of every track (see below);
• Transport control: go to start, play, stop, loop, rec enable, go to next/previous marker, slider (playhead) positioning;

Requirements

• Ardour version 3 (latest is better), version 2 supports only transport.
• Network connection. For smartphone/tablet devices you will probably use a wireless network, and if you don't have one and your computer supports it, you can share your wifi connection and use it for/from your device. Technically you should be able share your Android device connection with your computer, allowing you to still use your internet connection on your device. Keep in mind that this will obviously drain a lot of battery power.

How to make it work?

Start a session in Ardour, go to Edit/Preferences, then Control Surfaces and enable both checkboxes for "Open Sound Control (OSC)". Find the local ip address of the machine running Ardour ("ifconfig" command if you know how to use the command line, or check the network settings of your computer), it is usually something like "192.168.1.2". Run ArdouVy on the computer/device. It will try to connect and probably fail, so open the preferences (standard menu button on Android, F1 on computers) and edit the ip address field, then close the preferences and then ArdouVy. If everything is in place, at the next start, it will show the complete track/bus list, as it is listed in ardour. To access the prev/next marker and slider locator, just click/tap on the small button on the left of the main transport panel.

Faders

As default, ArdouVy will allow you to control the main volume fader for every track/bus. It is possible to control the [aux] sends of every track, which is very useful for musician monitoring while playing/recording. Unfortunally the OSC support for this is still incomplete, and you will need to set it carefully on your Ardour session. Every track that has a send must have it in the specific order of the busses in your track layout. Since the send gains are commanded using a simple number id, I have no way (yet) to know how many sends a track has and which are they. Sometimes you have tracks without sends, others you may not need to send to every bus, so just add the send and disable it. For complex routing situation (e.g. a drumset bus) you'll have to think about the way they are ordered. I'm sorry for this, I'm in talks with Ardour maintainers and trying to persuade them to add a more complete OSC support.

Known bugs

• Sleep mode makes the app close (get KeepScreen app on Google Play and add ArdouVy to its list)
• Fader "listen" (changing fader gains on Ardour should reflect on ArdouVy) doesn't work yet, but it will ;)
• Fader values will not be remembered once the app is closed
• Transport slider sometimes acts weirdly when manually moving to a location
• Timeout option in settings actually does nothing yet :)
• Ip address in settings accepts almost everything, it's up to you.

Contact

If you want to write me about problems, suggestions and (please, not too many) complaints about ArdouVy, or just tell me the name of your cat or what you want from Santa, you can contact me at maurizio.berti on gmail. This app is free, I'll add a donation system, but if you want to support me in some way in the meantime, you can visit my (almost empty) website, listen to some of my music and give me your comments:

[http://jidesk.net]

Also, something more on SoundCloud:

[https://soundcloud.com/musicamante]

Thank you, and make good music! :)