usb midi device problem + protools LE mbox2 mini

[Matthew Skinner]

Hi,

A few days ago a customer complained their USB midi device was not working, after hours of fault finding I discovered that protools and/or the mbox2 mini was the cause. After formatting the machine the USB midi worked great and the moment protools was installed with a mbox2mini the usb midi ceased to work or show up in any program.
I have since been able to reproduce this here on our own system. Uninstalling protools and mbox2mini does not solve the problem, once protools is installed the only way I have found to get the usb midi working again is to format windows.

I am using a ESI KC25 usb midi keyboard on a full intel chipset system with winxp, the keyboard is not using a 3rd party driver but the standard windows "USB AUDIO DEVICE" driver that is built into windows.

I have tried a different usb keyboard and usb to midi converter cable and everything suffers from this same conflict.

The mbox2 mini installs the mbox2 driver and must disable the midi features of windows or something similar so windows does not show up a midi drivers that the hardware does not have.

Please help me fix this as its something that I can reproduce on different systems.

[Matthew Skinner]

Some more information after further testing...

Install on a clean system a digi002rack and this usb keyboard and it all works great.
Install on a clean system a mbox2 and this usb keyboard and it all works great.
Install on a clean system a mbox2 MINI and this usb keyboard and the keyboard will not show up as a midi port in any software or even at windows level.

Only way to fix this is to format and resintall everything and not to use a mbox2 mini.

I just tried a different brand and found it only seems to be ESI branded keyboards which do this, ie the kc25 and kc49. I have sent this to ESI to look into however it does not explain why protools causes this to occur yet other software does not and why its only the mbox2 mini ?

Hopefully someone else has found this problem and has a resolution.

[JMS40]

Are you sure that "full intel chipset" is a compatible one?

[Matthew Skinner]

Yes its a compatable one which we have been using to demo protools systems on for the last 2 years. No problems with mbox2, mbox1, 002 or 002rack only the mini has this conflict problem. Yes I really do have all of these and tried them. It has also had this happen on a different computer at a customers place.

I reported this issue to Digi tech support last week and they were going to report the issue to the head office to be looked into and so far no response.

[JMS40]

Good luck.
Let us know what you hear.

[jtauban]

Having the same problem here, so i'm ressurecting this thread hoping someone has a solution...

Keyboard I use is a waldorf blofeld keyboard. PTLE8 with mbox2 mini.

Prior to the PT installation, i could use it for usb midi stuff. Seems the mbox2 mini MIDI drivers are causing the problem.
Anyone can help????

Julien