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recommended midi interface


Guest paulrevelcet

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  • 1 month later...

as a former guitar center employee, and dealing with ALOT of midi and audio hardware, and midiman 1 on 1, i have to agree with everyone with the midiman 2x2.  i've had mine for 4 years now and after heavy stage and studio use, it still runs solid. could be it's made like a tank. all my customers never complained about their 4x4's and 8x8's (my next big buy unless midibox comes out with one).steinberg midi stuff..... sucks. motu's drivers are pretty much only written for mac, and their pc support is horrible. as far as soundcards, i use to have a m-audio 10x10 rack module that crapped out on me after only 6 months and the one ther replaced me with died a year after that. alot of my friends have used the omni and had really good results. not so much with their audio useb stuff though. I now use a seasound solo EX and a creamware pulsar2. both have midi, but i still use the midiman.

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Interesting comment regarding MOTU drivers for PC. I'm currently considering to buy a MOTU Timepiece AV (for PC usage), and never heard about this driver problem.

Regarding alternatives: does anybody in the MIDIbox community have experience with Digidesign MIDI I/O and SYNC I/O. In the paperwork it looks pretty interesting. Nevertheless it's not a cheap solution, I know. But professionals seem to use it as a robust equipment for their daily work.

Cheers,

Skunk

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the digisesign stuff is great. i don't care for protools, but their hardware is solid. if you are using xp, the motu should run ok. most of the problems we ran into was with irq issues, so if need be, just play musical chairs with the slots. hope that helps. if you do get the motu and have issues, let me know. i do have alot of motu fantatical friends that might be able to help as well.

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  • 2 weeks later...

yes, i recommend m-audio/midiman stuff as well (having an 8x8s in my rack). Very well built and very solid and fast timing. i missed standalone programmability and more patchbay func's like filtering, but merging is really great on this machines. i can use pc and mac and drivers for com and usb are both rock solid. i would recommend using usb, buy an usb repeater, if your pc is too far away from your rack.

btw. the "driver updating strategy" of m-audio is: build a driver, make 3 versions, never touch it again...a little bit disappointing since theres a lot of potential to make their interface software a little bit more userfriendly...

Heard of a friend of mine, beeing disappointed from the 1010 audio interface drivers. he ended up using the hoontech drivers for the dsp 2000 (same chipset) because he never got cascading 1010s working with the m-audio driver...a feature they used to announce widely in the marketing of this excellent hardware unit.

They could do better, but at least all released m-audio drivers can be  considered "stable" in usability terms.

hope this helps others to decide on their own.

a little insider tip: opcode's rocksolid studio hardware can be obtained very cheap nowadays at ebay - lots of bang for the buck, but be shure you don't need support to get it running...if you own a mac, don't think twice and buy, on PC - read and think before buying

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  • 2 weeks later...

i think it all depends on what you're using it for. for me at least, if i am using cpu intensive vst'is or just have a crapload of files playing, i get lag, but that's all due to cpu. i use mine for studio, and extreme live use.  now a midi port on your soundcard is optimal. my creamware card's midi port is alot faster than the 2x2, but that could be due to the dsp chips. the only real midi interface hardware i've ever refused to work with, after initail testing of course, are steinberg devices. their lag was in the inopporable range.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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