--- layout: default title: Using the Presonus Faderport menu_title: Presonus Faderport ---
Since version 4.5, Ardour has had full support for the Presonus Faderport. This is a compact control surface featuring a single motorized fader, a single knob (encoder) and 24 buttons with fixed labels.
The Faderport comes with a single USB socket on the back. Connect a suitable USB cable from there to a USB port on your computer. As of the end of 2015, you should avoid USB3 ports - these cause erratic behaviour with the device. This issue might get fixed by Presonus in the future.
Ardour uses the Faderport in what Presonus calls "native" mode. You do not need to do anything to enable this - Ardour will set the device to be in the correct mode. In native mode, the Faderport sends and receives ordinary MIDI messages to/from the host, and the host understands the intended meaning of these messages. We note this detail to avoid speculation about whether Ardour supports the device via the HUI protocol - it does not.
The Faderport will be automatically recognized by your operating system, and will appear in any of the lists of possible MIDI ports in both Ardour and other similar software.
To connect the Faderport to Ardour, open the Preferences dialog, and then click on "Control Surfaces". Click on the "Enable" button in the line that says "Faderport" in order to activate Ardour's Faderport support. Then double click on the line that says "Faderport". A new dialog will open, containing (among other things) two dropdown selectors that will allow you to identify the MIDI ports where your Faderport is connected.
Once you select the input and output port, Ardour will initialize the Faderport and it will be ready to use. You only need do this once: once these ports are connected and your session has been saved, the connections will be made automatically in this and other future sessions.
You do not need to use the power supply that comes with the Faderport but without it, the fader will not be motorized. This makes the overall experience of using the Faderport much less satisfactory, since the fader will not move when Ardour tells it to, leading to very out-of-sync conditions between the physical fader position and the "fader position" inside the program.
The Faderport's controls can be divided into three groups:
Because the Faderport has only a single set of per-track controls, by default those controls operate on the first selected track or bus. If there is no selected track or bus, the controls will do nothing.
The transport buttons all work as you would expect.