10 Sep
2004
10 Sep
'04
4:56 p.m.
On Friday 10 September 2004 02:07 pm, Martijn Sipkema wrote:
"Especially bad" is still pretty vague. What might look bad on paper might be
acceptable in context...
On Fri,
2004-09-10 at 07:49, Martijn Sipkema wrote:
Hmm.. I'm just about to drop $400 on a USB MIDI interface (Edirol
UM-880), so that's not something I want to hear!
Is the timing really that bad? I don't even think a firewire 8x8
rackmount MIDI interface exists, so my options are kinda limited. :/
Timing is especially bad when there is other data being transferred on > [...]
the USB specification. And it even appears like some vendors
> are (finally!) starting to follow suit:
>
> http://midiman.com/products/en_us/KeystationPro88-main.html
>
> - "USB class compliant-no drivers required for
> Windows XP or Mac OS X"
M-Audio started following suit only after they hung their engineers
with a USB cable and bought Evolution who had always made
class-compliant devices.
The problem here is that class compliant devices suffer bad timing
because they use bulk transfers for MIDI data. The standard for
MIDI over FireWire is much better. the same USB bus, as is the case with combined
audio/midi interfaces.
Perhaps, but midi takes a lot less bandwidth than audio so how much worse
could it get? It sounds like it wouldn't be a problem if you were
overdubbing, but potentially in a live recording/performance if you are using
the audio ins for a vocal mic or whatnot.
There are several USB interfaces that don't use
the standard
MIDI-over-USB protocol, but I don't think information about these
protocols is available.
Perhaps there are interfaces that support both the standard protocol and
one with better timing...
--ms