Anyone good with midi?

[Spudman]

I've got several devices I need to have hooked up to my USB interface that has midi inputs and outputs. I have two virtual amplifiers that require midi to edit, a midi keyboard and soon a midi DAW control surface.

How do I hook this all up? The USB interface has one input and one output. I need to know how to set the channels etc. so that they all will still communicate with the computer. It's baffling to me.

[jpfeifer]

Hi Spudman,

I'm not a midi power user, but I do have experience using it with recording setups like the one you mention.

There are a couple of ways to handle this.
One way is to connect up your devices so that you use the MIDI THRU output to feed into the MINI IN of the next device so that you have them all daisy chained together. However, you can sometimes run into MIDI delay problems by doing that, but it's worth a try.

The other way to handle this is to purchase a new MIDI interface that has more than one output. (these will give you several MIDI in/out and connect via USB to your computer. These will generally work better for you since you can dedicate specific outputs to connect up to specific devices, and have no lateny issues due to daisy chaining too many things together.

I've used these USB midi interfaces from Midiman and they work great! Here is one that I've used a lot and have had very good experiences with:
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=midiinterfaces
I've used the MidiSport 2x2 and it works really well, I would also expect their other Midi interfaces to be of similar quality.

I hope this helps
--Jim

[Spudman]

Thanks Jim. I'll look into a midi hub. That makes more sense because the two Behringer units don't like the midi through. If set that way then I am unable to use the computer editor program with them.

[deeaa]

Are they all really hooked via MIDI? I mean, they're just some older 'dumb' midi devices not USB-equipped gear? What virtual amps do you mean???

I've never used that much MIDI, only some controllers etc. but they've been very simple to set up. Just plugin from outs to ins of the next device in most cases. There's no use using the midi thru I understand if the end device only has one port anyway. You would use the thrus when for instance when you have two rack effects controlled via MIDI; you don't want the first device's output to go to the next device in addition to what the controller sends.

BUT if they're all going to the same end device, you need to send all the device's commands there.

Further, I understand no matter how it's set up in the end, it's a case of finding out what signals will be going to the computer and then map each MIDI signal to the desired command in the software. For instance I map one device so that one generic button changes track, another does undo, third play etc. etc. and on another device I have sliders mapped to DAW channel faders and such, and for that I got some ready-made presets for Cubase off the net.

I might be wrong, but I believe in case of the computer, it doesn't really matter what midi channels the devices use, you just need to map the signals on the computer to their correct functions. BUT you must set each device to use a different channel so they don't overlap. In case of actual devices the send device and the receiving device must use the same channel, though, but also there you'd program the end device to respond as you like when it gets a certain MIDI command over the link. This is just guesswork - I do not know if the MIDI interface you have will only accept signals from one channel at a time or all.

I haven't really used anything true MIDI with any of my gear in ages except to do a MIDI dump from device to device to save settings or remote-control or sync two FX boxes, it's basically all hooked up via USB...I did have a MIDI keyboard/PC card system back in 1998 but I thought it had pretty much died since that in PC world and everything just uses MIDI over USB.

Currently I use a mixer device, a remote controller and a keyboard in my DAW, all sending MIDI over USB.

Well I guess this wasn't very helpful, sorry...:-)

[Spudman]

Thanks for the input.

The issue with the Behringer V Amp units, which have both midi IN and OUT, is that if they are run in the midi THRU configuration they will not accept data from the computer based editing software that allow editing the patches in the units. This is why hooking up multiple midi items is a bit tricky for me.

[SuperSwede]

The most simple solution would be a midi interface with several midi ports. The midiman 2x2 that I have can only control two units at once. You could use midi through but then you would lose the ability to return midi data from your midi unit, so your editor program would not be able to "see" the midi unit and not receive any data (such as backup and midi parameter changes).