MIDI people: dedicated Opcode vs. Sound Blaster interface Qs

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been using an Opcode MIDI Translator PC for about seven years now. It connects to my PC’s parallel port with two MIDI in and two MIDI out ports; I’ve got one in and out to/from my keyboard.

The thing is ancient (e.g. the installation diskette has Windows 3.1 drivers), and it seems Opcode no longer supports it. Web searches tell me it will not work under XP - not so much due to a lack of XP drivers, but because XP calls hardware differently than Win9x. (Or something.)

I’ll be upgrading my PC over the weekend, which includes installing XP and a new Sound Blaster 5.1 card. I figured I’d have to go buy a new MIDI interface, this one USB-compatible, for around $100.

However, looking at the Sound Blaster specs, I see that you can attach a MIDI converter cable to the joystick port on the sound card.

With the Opcode, all of my sequenced files would be rendered through my keyboard, which obviously sounds (or at least sounded) much, much better than a sound card. When I play the same files at work, where I have a Sound Blaster “Value” or something, they just don’t sound as good.

My question is this: if I use a MIDI converter cable to my new Sound Blaster (which has an E-Mu chip for GM rendering), will the music files now be rendered by the Sound Blaster? Or would they continue to be rendered by my keyboard?

For all I know, the chip on the Sound Blaster will sound better than my keyboard. I do know the card does support a lot of effects, sound fonts, etc. that were previously unavailable to me.

Other question: if the MIDIs are indeed being rendered by the sound card, would that mean the audio output would be through my PC speakers, and not my keyboard? If that’s the case, I’d have to get better speakers.

Finally, once again assuming everything is rendered through a sound card in a plain old 32-bit PCI slot, will there be performance issues such as lag as I’m actually sequencing using my keyboard? For example, would it have trouble as I play a fast and complicated passage on my keyboard?

I’m buying the Sound Blaster anyway, but the MIDI converter cable costs about $35 CDN. I’m wondering if I should just skip those cables and buy a dedicated USB MIDI interface.

Help! :slight_smile:

2

FWIW, I’m running an Athlon K6-2 @ 450 MHz with 256 MB RAM.

3

It’s up to you. With the Soundblaster you’ll have two ‘instruments’ available on your control panel; the Soundblaster and the Soundblaster MIDI Out. Windows is unaware or unconcerned of what’s at the other end of the MIDI Out, but if you configure it to be your default MIDI device, that’s where the MIDI will go. More sophisticated software will let you send MIDI to both the Soundblaster and its MIDI Out simultaneously

MIDI ports on soundcards aren’t as good as a dedicated MIDI interface, but in your case I think it will be perfectly adequate. They only start to struggle with many channels and chained instruments. I very much doubt you’ll notice any lag.

Opcode went bust a few years back and were bought over by Gibson. Gibson then pretty much asset stripped and ran the business down. I don’t think you can get any support for any of their kit now.

4

Thanks, Futile Gesture. I did some research on the Sound Blaster with regard to MIDI and all that, and it seems that this should be better than rendering things through the keyboard, because I can install professional-sounding soundfonts. Basically, with those, my compositions won’t sound like cheesy karaoke anymore. Plus, I’ll be able to use effects.

What I’m going to do is buy better speakers with a subwoofer, and a headphone jack. (My current cheapo speakers have neither.) When I’m sequencing, I have to wear headphones for the “full” experience.

In terms of software, I have Cakewalk Home Studio 2004, which I’m sure supports all of this stuff.

In the end, I’ll be spending less money this way than if I were to buy a USB MIDI interface - and my stuff will sound better.

5
      • This gets down to an opinion, but:
  • Ummm, I am not certain, but last I heard, the Soundblaster cards had to do software-only processing under WinXP–which means LAG. You totally miss the Soundblaster onboard-chip advantages if you don’t use Win98 or ME.
  • And I had WinXP installed as a dual-boot on my Win98SE machine for a while. WinXP ran lots slower, and all of the Soundblaster’s functions on Win98 weren’t present (the “record what you hear” setting was one feature that was gone, there were others missing also but I forget them at the moment…). I was using a P2P WinXP copy, and I tried earlier this year–so maybe my copy of XP was bad (even though it worked and updated 100%) or maybe the drivers on the newer cards might support these things, but the problem then might be that it is a software/CPU function, instead of an onboard-chip process, in which case there’s no advantage to a Soundblaster at all, because you can get a DXI software plugin to play Soundfonts, but it lags more than a SBLive running win Win98/ME would… so look into that matter first: find out if the newer cards actually do any on-board processing of anything, and look around for people saying what they are running these things on (CPU speeds and OS choice).
  • I have a SBLive 5.1 running under Win98, and I have the MIDI cable (mine came with it way back when), and I found that a couple instruments wouldn’t work when hooked up to it. I ended up buying a M-Audio 2496 for audio recording anyway, and every MIDI instrument I tried worked 100% on that, so I can only guess that the SBLive isn’t quite up to standards–or is geting old (mine is like 5 years old).

So my suggestion is:

  1. If you can still find a new one, definitely buy a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 OEM/whitebox for $30, it sounds basically the same as the newer Creative cards. The new expensive ones play 24- and 48-bit, but only record in 16-bits, just like the $30 SBLive. The only one that really records in 24-bits is the Extigy/USB card, and it runs slower because it’s a USB device…and your computer is slow as it is. —>When they came out, truly-independent reviews noted that the Audigy/Extigy line didn’t really add any significant features considering their jump in price over the SBLive–there was a small drop in the (fairly high) recording background noise, but mostly what the newer cards have is lots of input-jacks to hook stuff up to–but all you really need is a line in, MIDI in/out and line out.
  • Also if you buy a SBLive, be sure to only buy one that has hardware Dolby decoding–there’s about 14 different OEM “Soundblaster” cards out there, all priced $20-$30 now, but the one that has Hardware Dolby decoding is the only full-featured card. All the others are lacking various features, and they often have driver issues because of this.
  1. Skip paying for WinXP for now. I would heavily advise that you “try before you buy”–I did, and WinXP ran a lot slower than Win98 did, and I have a 1200Mhz T-Bird w/256 megs DDR ram.
  2. If you want better audio recording and playback, then get a cheaper card just for that. That way you can still mix down soundfonts on your SBLive, and use the other soundcard for doing audio recording. The 24-bit difference is usually minor, but the M-Audio card has much lower background noise than the Creative does, and also plays audio a bit clearer than the SBLive does. …And before you ask I don’t think that Home Studio supports more than one input device at a time (so you can’t do 4-channel recording even if you had two different soundcards) and furthermore, Home Studio 2002 (what I have) wouldn’t support different bit-depths for devices–it defaults to the largest that all available devices can support. So before using the M-Audio 24/96 for recording, I have to totally disable the SBLive in the OS first…not a huge task, but something you need to know.
    ~
6

The newsgroups alt.music.midi and comp.music.midi would be a good source for concrete information on this topic as well.

7

Well, all I can say is that I’m thrilled to finally have thousands and thousands of quality patches at my disposal (Cakewalk HS 2004 comes with tons). For most of my stuff, I’m just replacing the crappy GM patches with equivalents from one of the better banks. For strings and wind instruments, I’ve got a lot of orchestral/symphonic sound font banks to choose from. I’m impressed.

I haven’t tried any sequencing yet, though, so who knows if there will be any lag. I’ve set Cakewalk up to use the Sound Blaster as MIDI in from my keyboard controller.

8

FWIW, there’s absolutely no lag between my playing and the Audigy. It works beautifully under XP with Cakewalk Home Studio 2004.

Sorry, DougC, but I just didn’t run into any of the problems you did.

9

Yeah, it’s do-able, at least as far as the hardware was concerned

I helped a friend do it with similar MIDI hardware and a generic sound card on a a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz under win95 in 1996-7, which is quite similar in power to your system (it may have been 1998 by the time we got a few driver issues solved through patches, but that’s due to the card manufacturer, not the hardware. It was far cooler than he expected, but in the end, he preferred to use his MIDI card as a controller for his accumulation of external midi-controlled rackmounts. I’m sure they were better in a technical audio sense, but the generic sound card was almost as good. I think his decision was partly colored by being a musician with lots of already purchased toys

Can you do it in XP? Well, recalling what we went through in '96, with then-unspoorted drivers on a quantum-step (Dos-Win95) OS, I wouldn’t try supporting it again. If 100 hours of your time and hair aren’t worth more than the $100, you’re too poor to be playing with electronic music gear instead of working a second job. That’s not an insult - it just means that you’d get to your goal in far fewer days by working at McD’s part time for 1-2 weeks to earn the cash for XP-supported hardware. Unsupported hardware issues can take months to figure out and fix.

If you think that stuff is fun (I did, at the time) chalk it up to education. But if you’re asking here, you might not want to.

10

All of the hardware I bought is XP-supported, and I had virtually no problems save for having to download updated drivers and switch some cables.

I can’t figure out if I’m insulted by the tone of your post or not. Maybe I should have made it clear that my needs are not of the professional recording or performance variety. I’d like a mod to close this thread before I get pissed off.