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Midi Control Angst


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I've tried for months now to get midi control from my Yamaha P60 to my Soundblaster Live with no success. (I have a Live! 5.1 I can exchange it with, but that's all the soundcards I currently have at my disposal...)

Running Windows 2000. The cable is brand new and should be working fine. I've been told that with Soundblaster I should have to configure channels or something but I'm not seeing where it is in any properties that I could do that.

I have the latest (shitty) drivers. Anyone got any advice? Should I just buy a nice new soundcard or a usb adapter?

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Is this with one of those horrible joystick port cables?

Anyway, a mistake a lot of people make is to read the labels. MIDI out should go in your controller's MIDI in, and vice-versa. MIDI out means "the MIDI signal coming -out- of the computer" in this case, not "connect MIDI out to MIDI out".

The cable should show up in Windows as MPU-401.

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Not retarded. Just interface confusion. It already took blood, sweat and tears and several years of battle to wean off from CV/Gate. How they ever agreed to use MIDI is nothing short of a miracle - it's like herding cats.

In the meantime, MIDI is a slow, serial protocol. Nothing wrong with serial but holy crap, it's time for something better than that, and preferably via a single cable. MIDI should've been as overspecified as IPV4.

Anyway, I digress. People put the USB cable in the USB bus because it says "USB". They ask "which one" because there's more of 'm and they've been burned in the past by putting a mouse in a PS2 keyboard port (an equal idiocy).

There's nothing wrong with making something impossible to hook up the wrong way. Think why 3.5 disks look like they look, or why those memory cards have that edge; you should not be able to flip them around and get away with it.

People put the MIDI out cable in the MIDI out input because it says MIDI out. Perfectly logical. And wrong.

If they had color-coded these things you'd never be confused. Too bad it just doesn't look cool if you have a blue, red and yellow 5-pin DIN port on the back of anotherwise completely black synthesizer.

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not "connect MIDI out to MIDI out".

How completely retarded would someone have to be to do that?

I know a lot of people who did the very same mistake. They are called "beginners" or "novice users". Also known as "noobs" at this board.

Ah yeah, there was a thread at this section recently which covered the very same issue, but oh... sorry... it's in german:

http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=84388

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