Making my PC talk to my synths

[numan999uk]

I have a Soundblaster Live! card in my new Win98 PC, hooked up via its game port to the MIDI in/out of my Roland XP10 and thence to a Yamaha P100 digital piano. MIDI In to the PC works fine, but not MIDI out to the synth.

 

A computer engineer has checked it out, and it works fine with his little Yamaha home keyboard. What on earth can be wrong? We had his keyboard next to my gear, and I played MIDIfiles through his keyboard with no problem. Plugging the cable into my synth didn't make it work. The cable is obviously not faulty. My equipment works fine with a little old hardware sequencer running it, so there is no hardware fault. My piano is set to MIDI Receive All (OMNI mode); the Roland synth is set with sounds on all 16 channels.

 

Any ideas?

[Byrdman]

Originally posted by numan999uk:

I have a Soundblaster Live! card in my new Win98 PC, hooked up via its game port to the MIDI in/out of my Roland XP10 and thence to a Yamaha P100 digital piano. MIDI In to the PC works fine, but not MIDI out to the synth.

 

 

Sounds like you have done just about everything one should to track this down. If his small keyboard could be driven from the computer and your equipment is responding to midi then the problem is probably something to do with voltage levels. I vaguely recall Soundblaster cards having trouble on occasion because the midi voltages were non-standard.

 

Will it drive the YP100 piano? Perhaps changing the order of the instruments will fix it.

 

Perhaps you should think about a USB to midi convertor. The simplest of these are somewhere around #50 and give two channels.

 

Can you drive the hardware sequencer from the computer? Does it have a through port? If so, putting this inline bertween the computer and the synths will probably also fix the problem.