Midi problems with Voyager RME

The Moog Forum Minimoog Forum
1

I’ve had some midi issues interfacing with DAWs with my RME voyager. I don’t think that the voyager is a problem, but perhaps someone here has encountered the same issue.

I am controlling my RME voyager with a pcr 500 rolland edirol keyboard. Everything works fine when going directly from the keyboard to the voyager. I would very much like to record the midi data of the notes I am playing so I can go back and modulate the entire performance. I use a midisport 2x2 midi interface to get midi in/out of my computer. The edirol is plugged into the midi in and the voyager is plugged into the midi out, with the usb connecting the midisport to the computer. Sometime this works fine. The voyager will accurately receive midi notes from both my DAW and the keyboard. Sometimes, seemingly randomly, this does not work. When this doesn’t work properly there is an varying latency of over 1 second. On top of playing things out of time, there will be additional notes and even pitch de-tuning (perhaps pitch wheel data??) being sent to the voyager. Sometimes restarting the DAW or even the computer will remedy this, but sometimes it does not. This happens when using both PT and Ableton. I tried connecting the edirol to the computer via USB and using the midi out of the edirol to communicate with the voyager. The problem is less severe with this configuration, but is still very much an issue. I have tried using a different midi keyboard, which did not help either. Could there be some settings with how my computer handles midi data? If it was just latency I would understand, but this issue involves WWAYYY more midi data being sent to the Voyager than it should. I have the voyager set to only receive data from midi channel 1.

Any ideas?

2

Sounds like you might have a MIDI loop.
Try the following:

Connect the Edirol keyboard to the computer via USB.
Connect the MIDI out of the keyboard to the MIDI in on the Voyager.
Do not connect MIDI out/thru on the Voyager to anything.

Then, let us know if you still have the same problems or not.

3

When routing things this way, the live playing of they synth works fine. In order for the keyboard to transmit midi data from the computer to the voyager, the keyboard settings need to be changed. Once changed the midi playback is significantly better. No more ghost notes or ptich bending or anything. Still the timing of the sequences is slightly irregular. It seems as though the midi via usb improves the issue, but does not actually resolve it.

4

If you get MIDItest from http://miditest.earthvegaconnection.com/ you can use it to see how good (or bad) your MIDI interface performs.
If your getting jitter figures under 3ms you should be ok.Good interfaces seem to have around 1ms jitter with the occasional event around 3ms.

Sometimes having network cards,etc enabled can wreak havoc with MIDI timing and cause audio drop outs.
You can you DPC checker http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml to see if anything is hogging your cpu time and then you can disable anyhting giving you trouble.