KVR Audio

kidseek · Post by **kidseek** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 4:29 am

When connecting a midi keyboard, what diffrences would there be if I connected the controller through my interface (MIDI) rather than straight to USB?

tapper mike · Post by **tapper mike** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 5:29 am

none.

Unless you have a crappy usb to midi cable.
What would make the bigger difference is your computer's hardware.

JimmiG · Post by **JimmiG** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 1:04 pm

Some older USB Midi keyboards were not class compliant, which meant they each needed their own driver to be installed in Windows and OSX. Newer ones don't need any drivers.

The biggest advantage of USB over MIDI in my opinion is that you only need one cable for power, MIDI In and MIDI Out vs up to three cables with regular MIDI.

lfm · Post by **lfm** » Tue Feb 14, 2012 2:15 pm

Pro Midi - one more usb port free if having midi ports that aren't.
Pro USB - need no separate powersupply for keyboard
Pro USB - no need for midi merge boxes if having other midi equipment

Alexiz · Post by **Alexiz** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 7:23 am

Another "pro USB" - some keyboards come with their proprietary software that extends the functionality of the keyboard when connected via USB (e.g., adds deeper or more flexible integration of sliders, etc., into recording or sequencing software, that is your DAW).

That said, after having tried this type of integration for some time, I eventually went back to the plain MIDI-to-MIDI connection. (I guess I'm old school...)

timobrien · Post by **timobrien** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 10:02 pm

ports are just big pipes to get data into the computer.

midi was developed on ancient 9600baud serial ports,
so a usb port is just a whopping bigger pipe to bring
the data into the computer. That's all.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 10:06 pm

the only advantage of midi over usb-midi is that the midi transport is a lot easier to implement. if you're not designing keyboards or usb-midi interfaces, there is no difference. usb-midi is light-years ahead with it's immense bandwidth.

tetsuneko · Post by **tetsuneko** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 10:09 pm

FWIW, I've had several keyboards that offer both USB and MIDI, and for all of them, performance was (and is) more reliable with the old MIDI.. Using USB gave me hanging notes every now and then.. YMMV as usual.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Fri Feb 17, 2012 10:59 pm

that's probably related to the "easier to implement" thing. they must have messed up their implementations i guess.

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Sat Feb 18, 2012 1:21 am

If timing really matters, use MIDI. But then your MIDI interface is probably USB too, innit?

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Sat Feb 18, 2012 1:24 am

Oh and as for class compliance, that works great on Mac but it's crap on Windows (in as much as Korg devices are concerned, which will be detected as MIDI devices but won't work without Korg USB MIDI driver utility being run) plus the BS of Windows wasting user time repeatedly installing the damn driver for every damn port you plug into!!

deleted · Post by **deleted** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 12:12 am

DELETED

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 12:43 am

detente wrote:
Jace-BeOS wrote:plus the BS of Windows wasting user time repeatedly installing the damn driver for every damn port you plug into!!
that's a really good point. even if it's harmless, it's kind of annoying from a system stability standpoint.

i don't find it harmless because of the way it complicates troubleshooting (which seems to be the default activity on Windows, once you get a few dozen things installed on a system). Device Manager does NOT identify USB devices sensibly when disconnected (and often when connected), so there's no way to know what you need to remove nor which port the items were installed to.

Worse: Windows has a limit on the number of MIDI devices it will accept (something like 10?) in one of its archaic architectural areas. Once Windows fills up those slots, the user is at great disadvantage on figuring out why their new (or reinstalled) device wont work. http://forum.cakewalk.com/fb.ashx?m=1924240

The people at that forum link above claim the limit was removed in Vista, but i'm not entirely sure i trust that (after all, the problem was itself an undocumented annoyance to users in the first place, so why would i trust there isn't other similar IDIOTIC and archaic architectural problems lurking).

Also: when MIDI over USB was devised, they chose the wrong transmission type (async) and the underlying results were timing problems and crashing MIDI drivers. i experienced this with the Yamaha UX256 on WinXP & Vista (ironically the DOS kernel OS didn't have this problem). Without including a time stamp, as Edirol does for their "high precision mode" USB MIDI driver, there's no way to guarantee that data will go where it needs to, when it needs to. Some info here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct04/a ... 1004-7.htm and here http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep02/a ... an0902.asp
(and like i said, all our MIDI interfaces are USB anyway, aside from a few firewire audio interfaces that include a set of MIDI sockets, so there's little way around this fundamental issue; make sure you have high precision USB interface drivers)

Sorry this info probably isn't giving a solid answer to your original question. i suggest getting a rock solid MIDI interface with lots of MIDI ports on it so that you have an alternative to moving USB ports around, unless you're dedicating ONE USB socket to each device and ONLY that device (which defeats the entire point of USB, thanks Microsoft). i really like the idea of USB, but Microsoft especially SUCKS at it. i don't know if Mac OS is enumerating every individual USB port and logging drivers in the kernel extensions/etc whenever i move a device from one USB port to another, but i DO know that it does't take any time at all to plug in and use these devices on the Mac and i've never had to troubleshoot this area on a Mac (so far).

JimmiG · Post by **JimmiG** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 8:02 am

That's some interesting information. I personally haven't had any serious problems with MIDI devices in Windows and I'm sure that's the case for the vast majority of users. However it's good to know about the quirks that do exist in Windows, in case you need to troubleshoot it one day.

MIDI latency has never been a problem for me. This has always come down to the configuration of the audio interface.

My Akai MPK has one weird "problem" when used over USB. When you play the first few notes after having plugged it in, the device "hangs" for about 5 seconds and stops sending MIDI. Then it rapid-fires the notes you played during this time. After this, it's completely stable.

With my smaller MidiStart keyboard, it would stop working after a few minutes when I had it connected with a really long USB cord. When I changed to a shorter one, it worked fine.

justin3am · Post by **justin3am** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 8:40 am

JimmiG wrote:My Akai MPK has one weird "problem" when used over USB. When you play the first few notes after having plugged it in, the device "hangs" for about 5 seconds and stops sending MIDI. Then it rapid-fires the notes you played during this time. After this, it's completely stable.

This issue isn't unique to your MPK, it's a bug in how Windows (Win Vista and Win7) handles class compliant MIDI devices. Windows will pass thrrough the first few MIDI messages it receives (between 4 and 64 bytes), then it will drop a few messages (between 16 and 128 bytes) and then the device will work fine. It's really frustrating to test class compliant MIDI devices in Windows because of this issue. I have to turn my controllers on and off a lot so I have to remember to move the pitch bender a bunch as part of any test procedure.

Of course this isn't a problem with MIDI devices that have their own driver (Novation, M-Audio) but since Akai/Alesis/Numark rely on Windows' USB Audio class driver, their controllers suffer from the limitations and bugs in that driver.

Advantages of MIDI over USB?