possibility of a firewire MIDIbox project

[eby]

I wonder if it this is already out there / anyone working on it ?. The reason I want a firewire interface is its speed, use it for organ midification(4 manuals + pedals and stops, at the mo Yamaha USB interface sucks, sucks even on Windows) and I use Macintosh computers.

[stryd_one]

Welcome aboard eby :)

I suggested this a while back, and a far more learned colleague pointed out that firewire is not suitable for midi. You're better off with USB I'm afraid :(

[reboot]

i think usb needs a kind of driver but firewire doesn't need

am'i wrong ?

[TK.]

Yes, thats wrong. All operating systems support USB MIDI by default. The windows version (provided by Microsoft) has flaws, but there are mostly dedicated drivers available to fix the limitations.

Under Linux and MacOS X no alternative drivers are required, as the performance is excellent!

Eby: I would propose you to join the GM5 bulk order, for this money you won't get a better MIDI interface.

For best performance, just connect each core to a separate MIDI IO pair, so that MIDI events can be transfered in parallel. A single GM5 supports 5 IOs, more than enough for your use case.

I'm using GM5 since two months on my Macbook, and it works like a charm (and I really stressed it a lot ;))

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[eby]

I suggested this a while back, and a far more learned colleague pointed out that firewire is not suitable for midi.

I was thinking something like a midi+audio out box, that makes firewire suitable. But haven't got a clue if its is possible.

here is my idea, well not really....  ;)

multiple midi IN's -> midibox -> firewire -> computer to process & audio out thru -> firewire ->midibox-> say 8 analog(mono) outputs -> amp -> speakers.

well, much like a lite MOTU  ;D

[cimo]

i think that speed is not a concern, i understand that, 480mbit/sec of midi data is kinda overkill.

but there is something i don t understand when you say that firewire is not suitable for midi, what s up then with my firewire soundcard, it supports midi with no problems at all.

simone

[stryd_one]

Short answer: Firewire midi really needs timestamping to be accurate. Even then, you can avoid jitter but it'll come at the cost of latency. There's plenty of bandwidth but the timing sucks.