midi to usb connector.

[oldrottenhead]

hi, am looking for some guidance, i have an alesis sr16 drum machine which i normally plug straight into my micro, but i am crap at creating drum patterns and songs on it. so what i want to do is plug it into my pc and build some drum tracks in cubase. unfortunately i only have your bog standard midi cables which i cant connect (as far as i am aware) to my pc, so i presume i would be best going for a midi to usb interface. can anyone point me in the right direction as to where to get one or are the easier ways of connecting them.

[64Guitars]

I recently bought an Edirol (by Roland) UM-2EX which does the job:

http://www.ediroleurope.com/product_overview.php?productID=899899

It has one MIDI In and two MIDI Out connectors, and an attached 4-foot long USB cable. I'd have preferred a USB connector and separate cable so that it could easily be replaced if damaged, but the attached cable is adequate. Drivers are included for Mac and Windows XP/98/Me/2000. Vista drivers can be downloaded from the Roland website

The UM-2EX sells for between £25 and £30 in many UK shops. Here are a few I found online:

http://www.andertons.co.uk/acatalog/info_UM2EX.html

http://www.guitarampkeyboard.com/en/um-2-ex/68721

http://www.soundware.co.uk/sc/products/Edirol%20UM-2EX

http://www.absolutemusic.co.uk/shop/view_product.php?product=edium2ex

There are lots of other midi-to-usb adapters available from Edirol, Yamaha, E-mu, M-Audio, MOTU, and others. Any of these would work just as well. You might want to see what's available at your local music shop.

Some computer sound cards have midi built into the joystick port. You just need to buy the proper cables to connect to the joystick port of the sound card, like this:

http://www.soundware.co.uk/sc/products/MIDI%20Adapter%20for%20Sound%20Card%206ft

But check your sound card specs first.  Just because it has a joystick port, that doesn't necessarily mean that it supports midi. Personally, I prefer the usb adapter as I have usb ports at the front of my computer and don't have to pull it out to look for the joystick port on the back.

That takes care of the hardware issue. The next thing to find out about (or maybe the first) is the SR-16's midi capabilities and if it's even possible to program or play the SR-16 via midi from cubase drum tracks. Try asking about it in one of the SR-16 forums. There are a couple in Yahoo! Groups here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=alesis+sr-16&submit=Search

Or maybe hooper can help you. I believe he said that he has an SR-16 too.

[oldrottenhead]

cheers, i just bought an edirol um-1x will need to fiddle about with settings, getting slight lag when using my midi keyboard, managed to get sounds out of the sr16 but need to do lots of reading, a large learning curve ahead.
am using cubase sx, when i have set for all midi in, nd microsoft in, playing keyboard with no vst instruments only very slight lag but when i try a vst instrument there is a major lag. by the way is a cheap casio keyboard i have.

i have set asio drivers full duplex thing. that seems to get best results, but i remember using earlier versions of cubase and i could solve that by adjusting buffer sizes, but i cant seem to work out how to do that in cubase sx2.
thanks for feedback i need all the help i can get.

[guitarron]

You should be able to adjust the latency(lag) in Cubase-I know that's how it works in sonar
Set it for a faster latency setting

[oldrottenhead]

thanks for all the help, but i just cant figure out how to do that in cubase, can see all the buffer and latency settings but cant figure out how to adjust them.

[PhilFromIT]

cheers, i just bought an edirol um-1x will need to fiddle about with settings, getting slight lag when using my midi keyboard, managed to get sounds out of the sr16 but need to do lots of reading, a large learning curve ahead.
am using cubase sx, when i have set for all midi in, nd microsoft in, playing keyboard with no vst instruments only very slight lag but when i try a vst instrument there is a major lag. by the way is a cheap casio keyboard i have.

I had the same problem when I was using my laptop's integrated sound card. I tried the "Reason 4" demo and the lag was so bad it was unusable. The same for VST instruments in Cubase. After some googling I found that somebody had written a free generic ASIO driver that works with most sound cards. It is called ASIO4All and can be downloaded here: www.asio4all.com. Once I installed that, I went into Cubase settings and selected that as my ASIO driver and the difference was amazing. I can play my VST synths via my USB midi port with no noticeable lag. I hope this works as well for you as it did for me.

-Phil

[oldrottenhead]

cheers phil i'll try that

[oldrottenhead]

big thanks phil. asio4all worked a treat for vst instruments, no lag whatsoever but, when not using vst there is a lag there now where there wasnt before, but no matter am more likely to use vst instruments anyway.

[PhilFromIT]

big thanks phil. asio4all worked a treat for vst instruments, no lag whatsoever but, when not using vst there is a lag there now where there wasnt before, but no matter am more likely to use vst instruments anyway.

I too noticed some lag when recording my guitar. Although I could monitor real-time while recording with no noticeable lag, the recorded material was always slightly out of sync with previously recorded tracks. So, after recording I would just select the newly recorded wave and shift it left about 50-80ms (which is about what the driver reported as my lag). That would put everything in sync again. I know there is probably an automatic lag compensation but I couldn't find it in my version of Cubase which is SE 1.

I'm glad the driver at least helped with your VST instruments though. I'm amazed at all the free VST synths and effects that are out there. Loads of fun to play with.

Take care,

-Phil

[Wartime Novelty]

Your best bet for an allround solution would be to buy a recording interface that has midi like the tascam us144 mkII itll cost around £100 but you wont get any latency issues and then your also set for DI guitars/bass etc micing amplifiers and vocals and you also have a second channel for whatever you may need it for.

[dasilvasings]

I still have latency with asio4all, but I'm talking about my small ASUS901 notebook (1.6 MHz/ 2GbRAM). Are these specs too low for runnings VSTi?