G4 533 Serial midi or USB Midi?

[J Fernandez]

Could anyone tell me what is the best solution for midi with protools.I have a Emagic AMT-8 midi interface and was wondering what is the best route,Serial or USB.I hear the new drivers for the AMT-8
work fine with Protools.Or do they not??
If some one at Digi could confirm this it would be a HUGE!! help.Thanks!

[Adrian Haselhuber]

Hi J Fernandez,

internal tests have shown that with typical MIDI interfaces serial ports offer better MIDI timing than USB. However, it appears that Emagic has done some good tuning to their USB drivers in conjunction with newer G4 Macs so the gap has closed and you should get excellent results using USB.

Hope this helps!

Adrian Haselhuber
Product Manager MIDI/Synth/Sampling

[J Fernandez]

Thanx !!!

[Graham Hinton]

The *best* MIDI solution for *all* PCI Macs is to use MegaWolf Romulus PCI cards with FreeMIDI 1.38 in OMS Emulation mode.
I've tested up to 3 cards in a 9600 making a total of 14 "dumb" MIDI ports and the timing accuracy of each was <0.5ms.
OMS has an internal resolution of 1ms and does not come close to this performance and if USB is involved it will jitter up to 3ms on just a 2 port interface.
Any multiport interface will create bottlenecks and delays, but USB ones are worse than serial types.

Using modem port replacement serial ports is not a good idea as this uses the Apple ASIC SCC which does not have FIFOs long enough to guarantee that it will not loose data under worst case Mac interrupt latency conditions. ie. sooner or later when it is busy it will fail.

I don't know why Digidesign still recommend OMS which is obsolete 68k code and do not support FreeMIDI or MegaWolf cards directly. Perhaps they would like to explain?

[bbuzzard]

The MegaWolf Romulus card is great and it is configurable to tighten up the serial performance! I purchased mine when I upgraded to a B+W G3(when they first came out). Between having serial ports and having an ADB port, I didn't have to spend so much money upgrading my studio. BTW, I had a clone before and it died on me, but if there where still clones available, I would buy one. Folks at Apple don't listen with an open EAR! Think different,eh ;-)

[J Fernandez]

Thanks!!
Do they have a website???Or where can i find additional info onthis card?

[MisterMe]

Where's the best place to buy the MegaWolf card at and how much is it?

[Bill Rigby]

Hooray!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finally some momentum on the Megawolf issue
Digi does not officially support this card as they have not tested it.
Graham, keep posting and maybe if there is enough noise on these user forums Digi will have to sit up and acknowledge.
It may not help their USD sales but it will increase their credibility amongst their users, as you know word of mouth helps everyone.

[Graham Hinton]

I have written to enough people at Digidesign and offered cards for qualification testing, but I don't even get a polite reply. Just like customer support really...

In the US go directly to www.megawolf.com and tell Ward you are a ProTools user and that I sent you.
In Europe contact me. More details on my website
http://www.hinton.demon.co.uk/mac/macmidi.html
http://www.hinton.demon.co.uk/mac/mac_if.html

Any questions, just email me - I've been using these cards since PT3.

[J Fernandez]

What is price of this card?What interfaces are compatible and which are not??Ive emailed this company twice over the last two weeks with no response