Getting MIDI to work in Ardour/Jack

I’ve been struggling for a while to get MIDI to work properly in Ardour—i.e. in a way that didn’t involve hand drawing of MIDI notes. Since what was stopping me was of the “is the computer plugged into an outlet” variety of problem, I thought I’d say what I fixed here.

The problem

The basic problem was that I couldn’t get any MIDI controller to register a note in Ardour. I could (I thought) hook up the connections correctly in JACK (and I was in fact doing it correctly), but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my inputs to be reflected in Ardour when I tried to record. More annoyingly, it had worked in the beginning when I first set Ardour up. Read the rest of this entry »