Midisport vs. Digi 001

[juggernaut]

Hey Stu. Good to hear from you. Yes actually Pro Tools rocks, I have to admit. BUT..hehe. I came back to this post to retract my statements about the DIGI 001. I admit it is great for what it was designed to do. Unfortunately it's just not appropriate for the type of music I'm making. I spoke too soon on this previous post. I was able to get the DIGI 001 triggering Reason at 11ms without using ASIO. 11ms wsnt bad, but not perfect. Also noticed poor sound quality in Reason when trying to use the sound manager as the audio driver. Stienberg released an ASIO driver for the DIGI, unfortunately the lowest latency you can get with it is 32ms. That makes it pretty much impossible to play drums while monitoring through the system. Niether Stienberg nor Digidesign has plans to release a new driver. They are both pointing the finger at each other to do this, so most likely it's not going to happen any time soon. Understand that this is only an issue when trying to use the DIGI with ASIO programs like Reason, Cubase, Logic. The DIGI has great latency rates when using Pro Tools. The other issue that I was aware of, but thought I could live without is that Pro Tools also doesnt support Rewire, which means you cant stream the audio from Reason to tracks in Pro Tools. These 2 issues combined made me finally decide to take back the DIGI and get an M-Audio Omni Studio which includes a Delta 66 sound card. I also hooked back up the MIDIsport. So far, I have found out that the only reason I was getting poor latency out of the MIDIsport before was because I needed to use ASIO with a better sound card like the 66. I can now trigger Reason using ASIO at 2ms, and I might be able to get that lower with some different settings. Hell yes! Finally. It's been kind of a nightmare to tell you the truth figuring out what equipment was best for me. I've only had the Omni for 3 days though, so who knows what kind of problems may arise. However so far it's a dream. I miss the simplicity of Pro Tools however, and also the DIGI 001 has more I/O.
To summarize, I dont recommend the DIGI 001 for people who want to use Propellerhead Reason or other ASIO or Rewire capable software programs. If you dont need to use that type of software or your main goal is recording live instruments and drums etc... I would however definitely recommend the DIGI. I cant yet give a full recommendation on the Omni studio just yet till I have more time to experiment with it. However so far it looks like it's going to be a great relationship.


[This message has been edited by juggernaut (edited September 28, 2001).]

[mcconaghy]

I've noticed the MIDIsport interfaces having a noticeable latency when used in a live setting, be it just triggering something through it in the studio, or (more tragic) on stage. I don't know why, I wish it didn't, cause a lot of people will be looking at that family of MIDI interfaces just because of the price.
The DIGI 001's MIDI interface reacts as reliably as Emagic's Unitor, or the MOTU MIDI Express or Timepieces, with no noticeable latency.
Hey, Juggernaut, how are you getting along with ProTools, is that software a dream, or what?

Stu

[juggernaut]

Hey Stu. Good to hear from you. Yes actually Pro Tools rocks, I have to admit. BUT..hehe. I came back to this post to retract my statements about the DIGI 001. I admit it is great for what it was designed to do. Unfortunately it's just not appropriate for the type of music I'm making. I spoke too soon on this previous post. I was able to get the DIGI 001 triggering Reason at 11ms without using ASIO. 11ms wsnt bad, but not perfect. Also noticed poor sound quality in Reason when trying to use the sound manager as the audio driver. Stienberg released an ASIO driver for the DIGI, unfortunately the lowest latency you can get with it is 32ms. That makes it pretty much impossible to play drums while monitoring through the system. Niether Stienberg nor Digidesign has plans to release a new driver. They are both pointing the finger at each other to do this, so most likely it's not going to happen any time soon. Understand that this is only an issue when trying to use the DIGI with ASIO programs like Reason, Cubase, Logic. The DIGI has great latency rates when using Pro Tools. The other issue that I was aware of, but thought I could live without is that Pro Tools also doesnt support Rewire, which means you cant stream the audio from Reason to tracks in Pro Tools. These 2 issues combined made me finally decide to take back the DIGI and get an M-Audio Omni Studio which includes a Delta 66 sound card. I also hooked back up the MIDIsport. So far, I have found out that the only reason I was getting poor latency out of the MIDIsport before was because I needed to use ASIO with a better sound card like the 66. I can now trigger Reason using ASIO at 2ms, and I might be able to get that lower with some different settings. Hell yes! Finally. It's been kind of a nightmare to tell you the truth figuring out what equipment was best for me. I've only had the Omni for 3 days though, so who knows what kind of problems may arise. However so far it's a dream. I miss the simplicity of Pro Tools however, and also the DIGI 001 has more I/O.

To summarize, I dont recommend the DIGI 001 for people who want to use Propellerhead Reason or other ASIO or Rewire capable software programs. If you dont need to use that type of software or your main goal is recording live instruments and drums etc... I would however definitely recommend the DIGI. I cant yet give a full recommendation on the Omni studio just yet till I have more time to experiment with it. However so far it looks like it's going to be a great relationship.

[This message has been edited by juggernaut (edited September 28, 2001).]

[mcconaghy]

I've been using the DIGI001 with Reason, and my latency has been around 2ms constantly, while using the ReWire-DirectConnect adapter, which has been floating around the Net for a few months.
I haven't noticed any sound quality issues yet either, but I'm using Reason 1.1, so maybe that makes a difference, I don't know.
Sorry to hear you've been having problems with both, I hope your new configuration will work out better for you.

Stu

[Mick Wade]

Funny you should mention the MIDISport. This is an e-mail I just sent to MidiMan Tech Support. If anyone's got any suggestions on this matter I'd sure be grateful:

Hi, everybody:

I have a USB MIDISport 1X1 that appears to have some "reverse" latency problems when used with my sequencing software (Cakewalk 9.03). My system is as follows: HP Brio w/Celeron III (700mHz), Windows '98, and (if it matters) Lexicon Core2 soundcard. What I am specifically trying to do is sync-record some sequences I had created way back when on a Yamaha QY-10 into Cake for editing purposes. These sequences have all been transferred to floppy as MIDI files via an Alesis DataDisk. Aftert connecting the DataDisk to my PC by way of the MIDISport, I discovered much to my chagrin that the DataDisk did not transmit MIDI Sync, but rather only received it. No problem, I thought, I'll just play the sequences and record them to Cake in real time and use the "Slide" function on Cake to shim everything to its proper starting place. Well, this seemed to work okay until I examined all the MIDI data on the individual events (clock placement, gate time, velocity, etc.) and noticed that the measure, beat, and tick counts were out of place at various points in the sequence. Instead of appearing too late they were appearing too early (and I made sure that the tempo indicator on Cake matched the tempo of the sequence)!

I can't imagine that this would make any difference, but the ppq resolution on the Yamaha QY-10 is 24, whereas the minimum setting for this on Cakewalk is 48. After doing a great deal of experimentation I decided to put together a simple, one-track sequence on the QY-10 itself that consisted of nothing but ten measures of quarter notes at 120 bpm. The QY-10 does transmit MIDI Sync, so I knew that whatever was produced would be in time to the best of my equipment's ability (such as it is) by using this feature. With Cakewalk's ppq resolution set at 48, a properly-executed measure in our example should have looked like this on the event view:

01:01:00 01:02:00 01:03:00 01:04:00 etc.

This is what I ended up with:

01:01:00 01:01:47: 01:02:47 01:03:47 01:04:47 02:01:47 02:02:47 02:03:47 etc.

Obviously, this creates major problems when it comes to editing sequences with ppq figures of 196, 240, and higher, which I intend to do. I've "dumbed this down" about as far as I can think of, and still no luck. Is my MIDISport just not up to the task here? Is there something I can set to improve performance with respect to MIDI transmission? I truly hope that this is something simple that I'm overlooking, and your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Mick Wade