© Earth Vega Connection, 2007 |
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| February 6th 2007 |
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Good news for the fans of the Midi Translator. The new driver update finally supports a feature
of the Midi Translator that up till now was not available on Windows 2000/XP: daisy-chained devices.
As you may remember from reading the original manual (don't tell me you didn't), Midi Translators can be
linked together and then will act as one big device. Up to 4 Midi Translators can be daisy-chained in this
way, giving a total of 8 input and output ports. The DirectMusic driver finally supports this feature!
Please be aware that if you want to use this feature, all Midi Translators that are not directly connected
to the computer need their own power supply. Also make sure you read the original manual because you have to
change a jumper inside of the docked Midi Translators.
Beside this improvement there is also a small change to the driver configuration tool. I addedd an option
to tweak the parallel port communication speed. In some cases this might help to solve hardware incompatibility
problems.
The new driver setting is called 'latency'. The default value is 1 but you can increase it to 999 maximum.
It is advisable not to set it too high. I recommend not to set it any higher than about 32. If you have no
problems with the reliability of the parallel port communication than just leave the latency at it's
default value.
You can find more information in the new 'Read Me' file that comes with the update. You can download
the update here (only for registered users).
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| November 8th 2006 |
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To be honest I would not have thought that after more than two years of stable
use of the driver I would still find a bug in it. Yet that is what happened. Well, what
can I say? It's the nature of software. You can never be sure it is error free.
Fortunately there exist people who can fix it as well! Go get the patch
here and let's hope we squashed
them bugs for good.
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| July 3rd 2004 |
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The best and most stable version of the driver is out now. You are adviced to
update to this version. Download the patch now (only for registered users).
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| March 29th 2004 |
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A new bugfix release is out. Some users reported
strange behaviour of the driver, sometimes leading to serious crashes (BSOD).
Claude Voit discovered this problem with the 8 Port SE driver but it applied to the
Midi Translator driver as well.
It appeared that system exclusive messages of certain sizes would lead to data loss and memory corruption. Because
of the relatively rare occurence of this problem it was missed in the test phase.
On top of this I improved the handling of so-called system realtime messages and reduced
the memory usage of the driver considerably.
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| January 9th 2004 |
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There is a new version of the DirectMusic driver out. Registered users
can download a free update patch here.
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| October 31th 2003 |
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It has been announced in this same place but finally it is there.
The Midi Translator DirectMusic Driver was released today. Registered users of the Midi Translator
WDM Driver received an email notifying them of the special upgrade offerings. If you are
a registered user of the WDM driver and you did not receive the mailing, please contact me and
I will send it to you.
The DirectMusic driver will replace the WDM driver. The WDM driver will from now
on only be available by special request. If for some reason you prefer the WDM driver to the
DirectMusic driver you will still be able to order the WDM driver.
The new DirectMusic driver is fully backwards compatible with the WDM driver. No functionality
is lost, only new features are added. Technically speaking the DirectMusic driver is even still
a WDM driver. To avoid confusion and to keep the old and the new driver apart I use these
names to refer to them.
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| October 18th 2003 |
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I added an installer program to the demo driver, making it a lot easier to install (and
uninstall). I am removing part of the installation manual from the web-site. It's not needed anymore.
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| October 12th 2003 |
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I discovered a fairly serious bug in the demo driver when running on Windows
XP. If you open an input when the driver is active, the system will freeze
when it receives input after the time-limit has passed.
As I do my development on Windows 2000 and the bug does not occur on that OS, it
managed to escape my attention all this time. I have put a new version of the demo up that
fixes the problem.
This bug applies only to the demo driver and happens only on Windows XP. The full version
drivers don't suffer from it.
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Uses DirectMusic technology for faster hardware access
Multi-client capability
Easy renaming of individual inputs and outputs with PortNamer utility
New installer application makes installing and uninstalling the driver a breeze
Read more about DirectMusic and the driver here.
The Midi Translator PC is a MIDI interface that connects to the parallel port of your PC. It was first released by Opcode in 1996.
It came with a driver for Windows 95 that also works on Windows 98.
Since then no new drivers have been released for this device. Until now.
You need a WDM driver if you want to work with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. WDM stands for Windows Driver
Model which is the standard for drivers for these operating systems.
There are not many MIDI interfaces that connect to the parallel port for which WDM drivers have been developed.
Most MIDI interfaces produced nowadays connect to your PC via USB. I personally think that USB in its present form
is not particularily suited for connecting such realtime devices. The main reason lies in the WDM driver model
itself. The WDM model is a layered model. Messages from and to a device have to pass through these layers. The more
layers the slower the communication between device and system will be.
A developer writing a device driver for a USB device will not write the various layers himself. Many of the layers
in the communication are part of the operating system. The Windows operating system was never designed for real time
operations. It was designed mainly for business applications. USB was designed for connecting printers and scanners
and the like. A printer doesn't mind waiting for half a second. For a MIDI interface such a delay is disastrous.
Interfacing through the parallel port is much more straightforward. The operating system provides for in-between
layers but they can be easily bypassed. This way a driver can talk straight to the hardware and thus provide faster
handling of MIDI data.
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