Suggestions needed for a FAST and portable midi interface

[Manuel1975]

Hi There,

 

Im looking for a fast and portable midi interface. Connection options are Firewire800, USB and thunderbolt and It will be used on a MacBook Pro Running OSX. I need one Midi Input and one midi output. Nothing more. NO audio etc IO needed.

 

I have the M Audio UNO midi interface wich is mostly a cable and I like to portability of this product but it is a little slow. Im receiving midi timecode one the midi input and because this is a lot of data this generates delay. I think the processor is smaller / cheaper and therefore slower in such a small product, maybe the bottleneck?

 

My question is:

What is the fastest portable (meaning small form factor) midi interface on the market?

 

(If small form factor means less processing power and thus delay I will consider a larger midi interface)

 

Thank you for your input!!!

[paulears]

I suspect you are looking in the wrong place - there's no problem with MIDI timing on USB1, let alone USB2 or Firewire. The usual snag, especially with continuous data in large amounts is the MIDI buffer size your system is using, which is explained in this useful article.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec07/articles/cubasetech_1207.htm

[dbuckley]

Lets not forget that MIDI data is quite a slow data stream, only 31250 bits per second, if its al being done with real MIDI cables, and that processors twenty years plus ago were handling full MIDI data streams, stuff like 6502s and Z80s... That SOS article is right though, and the one millisecond resolution problem pops up in sending MTC; you need more accurate resolution than 1ms to send correct MTC, so most time code seen these days suffers from a lot of jitter.

[Manuel1975]

Great stuff!

 

Learned a lot from the article.

 

Question remains: what is the most reliable midi interface with 1 or 2 midi ports one can buy?

[paulears]

I'm not sure there's a correct answer to that one. My M Audio 8x8, for example - it was the most solid, reliable one I've had until I moved to Cubase 7, and I upgraded (ha ha) the operating system to Windows 7 at the same time. The same device now loses connection with the PC if it's not used for a while - which it never did before. I've upgraded drivers, changed midi sleep times - all the suggestions on the net, and it's now the most unreliable device I have. An old M-Audio 2x2 seems to work reliably - so the problem is really at the computer end, not the interface end of the chain. As we all have such different systems, it's always going to be a guess.

[Manuel1975]

Bought The motu micro express. So far very happy with the device...will report back after some time with the device...

[paulears]

My friend is a composer and he just bought a lexicon and is NOT happy. He's using cubase with vst instruments and he's not technical at all. His computer has serious latency issues and isn't up to it. He's blaming the lexicon but from pressing the key to hearing the note it's bad and it's doing his head in. You can compensate for it by bringing forward the midi playback but this constantly changing compensation he can't handle. Has anyone come across an automatic CPU compensator? It doesn't glitch but only speeds up by changing sample buffer size to very glitchy rates. Is there some kind of plug-in maybe?

[kitlane]

You could try asking this on the Show Control Yahoo group

 

There are some very knowledgeable guys there including John Huntington who literally wrote the book on show control and Charlie Richmond who was instrumental in the design of the MIDI Show Control Protocol.