#AKAI MIDI PATCHBAY FOOT CONTROL HOW TO#
#AKAI MIDI PATCHBAY FOOT CONTROL WINDOWS#

I tend to add all output sockets and then all input sockets but you may prefer to setup all sockets for a single application and then move on to the next. It is best to be methodical about this stage. Click one of them and you will see the window below. On each side of the patchbay window, you will see a button labelled 'Add'. There is no need to restrict yourself however and you could connect as many plugs to each socket as you wish (caveat - I don't actually know if there is a limit or what it is but it's more than is likely to be needed in any manageable audio setup). These sockets will be mostly stereo (ie with two plugs in qjackctl terminology) or mono ( ie one plug).

What I want for my setup is to have one socket for each end of each connection I want to be able to make. It can be a bit tedious but we should only have to do this once so it is worth persevering and getting it right. This is where we start the real, interesting part. Either click 'No' to get an empty patchbay, or 'Cancel' to give up and do something else instead.Īssuming you didn't give up, you now have an empty patchbay, split into Input and Output sections.

This will give you one plug per application which will almost certainly not do what you want if you connect them. When you see the dialog box which asks if you wish to take a snapshot :-ĭo NOT click 'Yes'. This is where all my confusion and problems started because I assumed that you needed to start by clicking 'New' so I will explain what not to do. However, when you have finished and wish to create another patchbay definition for the next song/overdub/band in your studio, you will need to click on the 'New' button. Disconnect all midi in qjackctl Connections windowsĪt this point, if this is your first set of patchbay connections, the system is ready for us to start adding plug definitions.

#AKAI MIDI PATCHBAY FOOT CONTROL WINDOWS#

Disconnect all audio in qjackctl Connections windows.The final jack connection setup which we are aiming for is shown in the images below. Since I am writing this away from my studio, I will use vkeybd to stand in for my real midi controller keyboard. I will use ardour, hydrogen and whysynth as the tools to be connected.

#AKAI MIDI PATCHBAY FOOT CONTROL HOW TO#

Since I am far too shy to stand up and perform live in front of an audience, I will attempt to describe how to use the patchbay to implement a simple studio rig which I can use to record drums, keyboard track and a single vocal. When it is setup correctly, the patchbay provides automatic connection setup for jack-aware applications, maintains connections persistently through application stops (or crashes) and restarts, and allows for easy switching between different setups (eg from one instrument setup to another between songs in a live performance). It is not an explanation of how to setup jack, qjackctl or any other tools and assumes that you can already do that but I hope it will be useful to somebody nevertheless. This document is my attempt to share that understanding with those in the same position as I was. Now, thanks to various hints on the linuxaudio mailing list, I think I understand how it should work and how useful it could really be. They both seemed to show the same information and the patchbay was not very useful. When I started using qjackctl I couldn't understand the difference between the patchbay and the connections window. You've done, in just a few paragraphs, what I've failed to do in all those four years QjackCtl's Patchbay has been around ) Cheers. Thanks Simon, for this excellent piece of work. Because of that, he has written a brief guide to using the patchbay and the document is here first released into the wild, hoping it will turn out to be useful to someone in the quest to make amusing noises at home. Fielding writes that after quite some time, and reading between the lines of various posts on the linuxaudio-user mail list, he has finally understood how the QjackCtl Patchbay works and what it is for.

Akai midi patchbay foot control