From: nick@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell)
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth
Subject: Re: MOTU Apparently Now hiring ex Radio Shack Employees for Tech Support
Date: 10 Apr 92 12:34:12 GMT
Organization: Friends of the Salter Duck
In-reply-to: metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu's message of 9 Apr 92 22:35:50 GMT

In article <204667@unix.cis.pitt.edu> metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu (metlay) writes:

   "Nick, what've you DONE to my CONTROLLER DATA?!"

   "Filtered it, John. We can't have full resolution or we'll hang the MTP."

I said that? Oh. Maybe John was just irritating me so I decided to cut
his connection! :-) I recall that Carl's MTP was fairly flakey so I was
treading very carefully with it. I tend to give mine a hard time and it's
usually quite happy.

   This isn't about continuous streams of note-ons on 64 MIDI channels all
   at once, or whatever other stupid paradigm the software people come up with
   to show how powerful the gear is.

Sure, BUT, that was what John was intimating at with his figures. If he
wants a system that can deal with the kinds of things you mention, fine,
and I can see that. But he was complaining that he couldn't run 32 cables
of full-density MIDI at once.

   This is about what is, for ME, a very
   real performance situation: I have a Prophet VS on one line, an Xpander
   on another, and a Microwave on a third, and I'm sending them all massive
   streams of controller data. BZZZZZT, no more headroom.

To be fair, the problem here is that you can't make a MIDI interfacing
or processing box powerful enough to do that without bringing out something
that can't be exported from the US due to CoCom regulations. Try throwing
that at your MRC, PG-1000, whatever and see what happens.

(There *is* an issue here regarding synchronisation of notes and so on
through a single serial line. I didn't mention this because, despite it
being perhaps the key to John's argument, he didn't talk about it.)

   This is how I work. I turn knobs, I run control signals into synths, I 
   generate long, gooey streams of bytes at a very high rate of speed. And
   this apparently is telling me that a Mac can't handle that. Strip away
   all the insults and everything else, and that's what's left: a Mac can't
   use an interface of this type for more than three or four data streams 
   at once without choking.

If John had just said the above, I'd have said, "Fine, I don't know if
that's a problem; let me try it on my setup and see." He didn't explain
that he wanted to do that kind of thing (I don't know if he does) and I
don't know if it's actually a problem. Having used a Mac for about 3 years
for MIDI (and a MIDI Time Piece for nearly two) I've never had throughput
problems with it.

Your worries and reservations are quite possibly well-founded. If you like
I'll investigate. John didn't mention any of this; I just answered his
questions.

Nick.
--
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