Most Stable MIDI Setup

[mikesong]

This is not a simple "How do I add MIDI to my computer?" I've researched that on these forums, and now think I understand it, however I need to know which options work best....please read on.

I am planning on a building a PC to be used for recording only, and want stability more than anything else. So far, my research has come up with this portion of the setup:

MAudio Omni Studio
AMD XP 1600
Asus A7M
512 MB Micron DDR PC2100 Ram
Seagate Barrcuda IV 7200 RPM 40 Gig (Audio Only)
Regular Hard Drive, Video Card, CD Drives still to be determined

Now I want to add MIDI capability to this setup, for the purpose of using softsynth/vsti's with a keyboard controller. I plan on using Windows 98SE and N-Track or Cubase. I've barely ever worked with MIDI before, and I want to set it up so it adds minimal complications to the rest of my system.

Should I go with:
-a Midiman-type device? Is USB reliable?
-a second sound card (SB-live?) do these sometimes create bugs in systems?
-something else?

Thanks so much for your help...

 

[drstawl]

Let me qualify my remarks by saying that I've personally used only the game-port shared soundblaster-type MIDI ports and external parallel port MIDI interfaces. I've seen the 8-port parallel designs used but never put one of them through their paces.

It seems to me that the success or failure of a USB interface would be more dependent on the driver interface. Here's why.

MIDI was designed around the early "serial" port as MIDI is a serially communicated protocol. That is the stream of information being sent to stimulate a sound module to make some noise is a "series" of commands.

Parallel is faster than this as it sends bytes at a time instead of bits.

USB is faster than parallel even though they went back to the bitstream because it's sent at a higher frequency.

I've never had as much as a hiccup from my parallel port MIDI interface not keeping up with 2x2 MIDI transmission. That's two MIDI ports worth of info coming in from keyboard or PC while 2 MIDI ports are going out to the sound module: a maximum of 32 channels of MIDI information in each direction.
Sure- you can overload even one channel by putting too many commands that are scheduled to take place at the same time into the stream.
But your synthesizer will be what craps out first from the data overload.
Barring that, parallel hasn't crapped out under a 2x2 regime.

 

[Garak]

Being stable in more of a software thing than hardware.

Right now the only stable PC operating system that is usefull for audio is windows 2000(2k). 98, ME, XP all suck. XP will get better once manufactures get some drivers out. 2k has its limitations though. With the delta 44 or 66(what the Omni studio is based on) you can only do 2 in/2 out in most software I have tried. The 2 in comes from the montior mixer so you can use all 4 inputs just that you will have to mix it down two 2 channel

USB works great with everything I have tried in terms of general hardware(printers, scanners, mic, etc...)

I'm yet to try it with audio but I don't see it being any worse than serial or parallel. Its better the whole way around. Its even better than pci. The only problem is that it has limited bandwidth(2in/2out with audio usually). Midi should be very easy to get working with usb.

There is a new version of USB thats faster than firewire but I haven't seen anything avaiable yet.

I just reread your post. and I guess I should add this.
N-Track is pretty cheep software and dosn't = stable.
Get away from win98SE. 2k is so much better.
I like Cool edit pro but it dosn't have much midi support(control surfaces only).

 

[mikesong]

Garak, I take your point about 98SE vs. 2K...however, at this point I believe the Delta won't support 24-bit in 2K? If that's so, then I'd probably just switch the OS when its supported.

I need to know what you mean by "better than pci"...lemme phrase it this way - what are the advantages/disatvantages of a sb live acting as a midi interface vs. a usb/parallel midi interface, in terms of stability, latency, etc...? Would a soundcard give me additional capabilites? Would it introduce more havoc into my system, etc?

 

[Garak]

24 bit playback seems to work fine in 2k. I haven't done any recording with 2k because its limited to 2 inputs. I use 2k for mixing down and everything but tracking. I often just use 16 bit anyway. I only spent the money on a 24 bit card because if it can do 24/96 it should be great at 16/44.1. I can hear the diffrence of 24bit but that diffrence is gone once I run a software noise gate on the track. There is just more detail of the noise in the background.

For tracking I use 98SE and I hate it. Blue screens and lockups come to mind when I think about it. That said on some computers I've had very few crashes and on others it seems like everytime I move the mouse it locks up. Win98 must of been programmed by a women. It has mood swings. It can work perfect for months then when you are just finishing a major project it will start crashing. A week later it will be fine again.

I use to like 98SE on my PII 400 then I upgraded to a Athlon 1Ghz with a cheep o motherboard and it worked fine for a few days. Then it started to crash. Then I went to reinstall and nothing would install on the machine so I updated the bios and it started to work again for a while. That didn't last very long and it started to crash again so I installed 2k and I haven't had a problem since. I got this laptop a year ago used with no CDROM it was a great deal so I couldn't pass it up. It came with win2k on it and at first I was about todo anything to get rid of it but now after using it for a year and only having it crash once because either the ram or the HD came loose(I dunno which because I took both out and put them back in before trying it) I've gone 2 months without rebooting this thing(it dose spend alot of time in sleep mode though).

The last few CD's I've worked on I've had some luck and the bands have supplied the computers because we are recording in their jamming space. Both of the computers were running win98SE and were stable for once. I just poped my delta 44 into them and installed the software and away we went. It ment less gear for me to drag around and if one of the band members wanted to listen to what we recorded before after I was gone with my gear they could.

Bah this has been a long post and its getting very late here. Arg 2:30 AM. I might as well answer your last question.

USB can be better than PCI because you can plug it in with out rebooting and most drivers will install with out rebooting. Also if the driver install screws up unplug the device and plug it in another port and it will reinstall the drivers most of the time.

I have run my delta 44 along side a sblive in one of the bands computers. It works fine but why add the extra bulk when you can use a simple little cheep usb interface. The sound card will give you two more 16 bit inputs and outputs that are handy for stuff like click tracks and recording scrap vocals, scrap bass etc...