Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 05:05:12PM -0000, bigcowboytim wrote:
> I am new to all this so your indulgence  would be appreciated.
> I would like to simply and inexpensively interface with Dell latitude D600 laptop PC.

bigcowboytim,

Summary: 1. Any brand name cable will probably suit you.  2. You'll be
disappointed with the cheap Ebay knock-off cables.  3. Consider
whether you'll eventually need a USB audio interface, as some of them
include a MIDI interface basically for free.

You'll probably be OK with any brand-name midi interface, at this
level also referred to as a usb to midi cable.  By brand names, I mean
Emu, M-Audio, roland, etc.  I see an emu cable on clearance for $30 on
musiciansfriend.com.

There are CHEAP usb midi cables on ebay, probably availble elsewhere.
I DO NOT recommend them.  If you look closely, they all seem to be the
same knock-off under different labels.  The one I tried has a bug
where MIDI running status does not get decoded correctly.

That sounds like an essoteric feature; last time I mentioned this many
people confused it with active sensing, which is a little used feature
that is not what I'm talking about.

Instead, this is a commonly used feature, where the first ("status")
byte of a message can be left out for subsequent messages where the
status byte would be the same.  So the sequence "NoteOn/Channel1 Note1
Velocity1" "NoteOn/Channel1 Note2 Velocity2" can be sent as
"NoteOn/Channel1 Note1 Velocity1 Note2 Velocity2".  (The first way is
6 bytes, the second way is 5 bytes.)

That's a lot of technical info that you really don't need to know.

But the result is that with these cheap knock-off midi cables, playing
my VFX into my computer, the computer only sees the first note of a
chord, not the second or subsequent notes.  In fact it doesn't see any
more notes until you let other notes up, and you can get stuck notes.
Maybe OK if you only play one note at a time, but I don't.  I verified
all this with Midi-OX.

I don't know what kind of horsepower your particular laptop has, but
if think you might get into audio recording with it as well, many
audio interaces come with a built in midi port that will work fine as
well.  For example, the well known tascam us-122 looks like it can be
had for around $70 on ebay; subtract the $30 you'd be paying for a
midi cable and you're only paying $40 extra for a decent audio
interface (but you've got the whole used vs. new thing to deal with; a
new, current version us-122 is around $130).

I haven't used any product mentioned above excpet the china knock-off
cable.  I have used older PC's with the game-cable midi ports, an Emu
1212m (PCI audio interface with midi), an M-audio quattro, and now
have an MOTU 8pre.  

All but the last two wouldn't work with your laptop.  The quattro is
available used but I've run into driver issues with it, and have heard
the tascam is much less troublesome, more versatile, and has a rep for
quality.  The 8pre I wouldn't count as inexpensive.

--> Steve
-- 
Steve Wahl    steve@...

<classyhorse23>  I had to google "jfgi" to see what it meant. The irony
is overwhelming.
    -- bash.org #761884