• From: Orlando, Florida, USA
  • Registered: 2007-12-16
  • Posts: 60

Topic: MIDI software patchbay..

Can anyone recommend a simple software MIDI patchbay (for Windows XP) that will work with the RME MADI MIDI.  I'd simply like to route MTC out from Sequoia out two MIDI ports at once. In other words, a "MIDI y cord" OR a software utility that will allow me to route MTC to two destinations, the first out MADI midi port 1 and the second out a virtual port that I can read on another application.

I found something called midi-ox and midi-yoke but would like some recommendations before experimenting with the  unknown, if possible.


Thanks,



Bob Katz

bobkatz's Website

2 Reply by Timur Born (edited by Timur 2009-07-25 09:33:51)

  • Registered: 2008-01-01
  • Posts: 3,025

Re: MIDI software patchbay..

MidiYoke (aka virtual Midi port driver) and Midi-OX (aka Midi routing, monitoring, Sysex, filter, Midi Sync and MTC) are more or less the standard on PC. Actually I know no other Midi software offering all that Midi-OX has to offer.

The main drawbacks of both are that they seemingly are not actively maintained anymore and that they only support MME but not DirectMusic.

Midi Yoke offer bandwidth upto 16x of what the Midi standard allows over the sum of all ports downto a single port. This can be quite useful if you are routing several inputs to a single virtual port or just sending lots of Midi events into software that can deal with it. Detection of Midi Feedback is configurable with three different methods being offered (including turning off).

I had some minor stability troubles with the combination of MidiYoke and Ableton Live. Usually it works out quite well though.

Alternatives to MidiYoke are Maple Midi (which caused me trouble) and LoopBe. LoopBe is quite interesting in that it offers upto 30 channels, looks actively maintained and the same developer also offers a Midi over Ethernet solution. Have a look here: http://www.nerds.de/index.html

3 Reply by bobkatz (edited by bobkatz 2009-07-25 15:06:04)

  • From: Orlando, Florida, USA
  • Registered: 2007-12-16
  • Posts: 60

Re: MIDI software patchbay..

Thanks, Timur. That's exactly what I was looking into. Thanks to you I just visited the LoopB page and this appears to be so much more intriguing and simple yet powerful for my purposes than the overcomplicated MIDI-OX and MIDI-Yoke. I've taken note of LoopB.

However, yesterday I decided to take the hardware route because it is reliable and doesn't eat into any CPU cycles. I ran another long midi cable from the studio into the machine room. I routed the MTC out of a spare port on my MOTU midi express (Mac) and boom, it's done. Now I have my extra physical connection and no worry about software routing and reliability. But it's good to have your references for software midi routers on the PC. The day will come.

And this brings up a point. In MC's "copious" spare time, it would be nice for him to make up a small router utility for the RME MADI Midi that would enhance its utility. I know it's only got three ports, but still these occasions come up where you want to feed the same signal to more than one midi output.

bobkatz's Website

4 Reply by Timur Born (edited by Timur 2009-07-25 21:41:25)

  • Registered: 2008-01-01
  • Posts: 3,025

Re: MIDI software patchbay..

You may be interested in one of my many irrelevant but inevitable testings (I did this one last year when looking for trouble with Ableton, literally): wink

Setup:

2 x Ableton Live running on Windows Vista, each using their own stereo output pair of a FF400, both playing the same audio files, but one phase inverted. Both pairs were digitally summed via Totalmix for output.

Now comes the interesting part: Both instances of Live were MTC slave synced to a single instance of Midi-Ox via MidiYoke running on the very same computer.

Result:

Complete cancellation, which to me looks like sample accurate synchronisation. Ableton support denies that this would be possible, but obviously it was back when I tested it.

That was before they "fixed" Live's Midi slave behavior though, from rough rounding to the next full integer BPMs to unrounded very bad calculation that's mostly off. Didn't have a look at MTC sync after the "fix", so maybe MTC was affected by rounding, too and thus the two instances could sync so perfectly against each other.

Whatever, both Midi-Ox and MidiYoke seem to be up to the task when it comes to Midi Sync, most likely LoopBe would be, too. Don't worry too much about CPU load. Even when most applications still cannot deal with Midi properly nowadays it's nothing that stressed the CPU any much.

  • From: Orlando, Florida, USA
  • Registered: 2007-12-16
  • Posts: 60

Re: MIDI software patchbay..

Timur wrote:

You may be interested in one of my many irrelevant but inevitable testings (I did this one last year when looking for trouble with Ableton, literally): wink

You're lucky. I have not found MTC to be accurate enough for sample accurate repeatability. In fact usually up to 1/2 a second variability. It's supposed to be 1/4 frame accurate, but on a single computer with all the overhead....


BK

bobkatz's Website

6 Reply by Timur Born (edited by Timur 2009-07-30 19:49:57)

  • Registered: 2008-01-01
  • Posts: 3,025

Re: MIDI software patchbay..

I just recreated that setup on my newer machine (Macbook Pro running bootcamped Vista). I even took it a step further and send MTC out over Firewire and received it back into the two host instances via USB. As a sidenot it turned out that using DirectMusic instead of MME might cure a bug in Ableton Live that causes Midi Loops to "jitter" upto 150 samples (even when not using external sync and even when using Live's own internal plugins).

Whatever, here is another intersting alternative for a Midi Patchbay that like Midi-OX allows to patch both virtual *and* physical Midi ports. Additionally it allows Midi-over-LAN. All at 89kb size and with a simple matrix GUI just like you like 'em. wink

http://www.hermannseib.com/images/miditrix.gif

http://www.hermannseib.com/miditrix.htm