Bc2000 (for the BCF2000 & BCR2000)

--- In bc2000@yahoogroups.com, "electron8000" <electron8000@...> wrote:
> On the FastTrack Pro soundcard there is an led indicating midi traffic. When only the BCN44 is connected, the led only flashes when i turn one of the knobs programmed for pitch/modulation. When i instead directly connect the keyboard to the soundcard, the led flashes constantly even when i don't press any keys on it. In this case no midi-signals are being received in MidiOx.

I've had a glance at the PSR310's manual:

In "Multi Mode" it sends a continuous stream of "Active Sensing" messages (each such message consisting of a single FEh byte).
Many "old" (80s/early 90s) MIDI devices did this.

In "Remote Control Mode" the PSR310 (also?) sends Clock messages (F8h).
From the manual it seems that in this mode it also sends the Active Sensing messages; however, on my (also old!) Roland R-8 drum computer it's either one or the other, so I'm not sure about the PSR310 in this respect.

In any case, these F8/FE bytes must be the cause of the continuous flashing by the soundcard's LED when the keyboard has been connected directly.

The BCN44 does NOT generate F8 or FE meessages.
I'm not sure whether the BCN44's MIDE merge mode passes on F8/FE:
does the soundcard's LED also flash continuously when the PSR310 is connected via the BCN44?

> If i try to use the "Midi-Merge" functionality (keyboard midi-out -> BCN44 midi-in, BCN44 midi-out -> soundcard midi-in) then i got a strange problem with latency. When i press a key on the keyboard, the keypressed signal is being send via the BCN44 to the soundcard and the note is being played. But if i release the key shortly after pressing it, then the keyreleased signal won't be sent to the soundcard (so the note keeps on playing). Same in inverted order. If i press other keys there always has to be a delay time of approx 1-2 seconds in between, otherwise the corresponding notes would'nt be played or released. I also used MidiOX to verify how often a midi-signal is being received by the soundcard with the same result.

It might help if you could make any incoming F8/FE messages visible in MIDI-OX, but I'm not sure if that's feasible: these messages can be blocked by the sound card, the MIDI input device driver or even MIDI-OX itself (although I doubt that).
As an alternative to MIDI-OX, you might try my own MIDI Tools (available from http://home.kpn.nl/f2hmjvandenberg281/miditls.html ): it also has a MIDI monitoring mode, but with some differences to MIDI-OX, which may or may not help in figuring out what's going on.

In any case, from what you're saying, it seems to me that there is indeed something wrong with the BCN44's MIDI Merge concerning the combination of F8/FE and Note On/Off messages.
But it's very strange indeed.
Personally I haven't used the BCN44's MIDI Merge much (or at all), so I don't know if it exhibits these problems with other keyboards as well - maybe somebody else can comment on that.

Mark.