Since I have this setup I’ve been struggling with the MIDI Express XT… It’s always when this nice 16 beat bassline that has a lot of potential is finally there, when you get that banging beat right… that It decide to fail… Turning an inspiring evening into a stressful troubleshooting episode…
This MIDI Express XT is what I decided to get as an upgrade of my 2 serial MOTU MTP AV that was also an upgrade from an old parallel MIDI Timepiece 2 (I am not learning) I was kinda used to glitches with MOTU products… I ended up thinking that the XT was just a new faceplate on the old hardware, and it still have the old problems with it.
But it was actually worse than the MTP AV. If notes were played really slowly I had a chance of not having problems… and I mean like a child playing piano for the first time… The moment I played several notes, played faster, played chords or turned up any sync or control messages… ciao! … the XT was giving up, choking, hanging notes, random notes, loosing communications with Clockworks or with the host…
Of course, I’ve gone the software route, tried Logic, Reaper, Maschine, Renoise, 32 bits, 64 bits, not a difference.
I’ve upgraded drivers, downgraded drivers, reset the interface, removed all MIDI device definitions, tried every MIDI devices configuration, still no difference. Then I also removed all every other devices on my Mac… nothing changed…
At this point I was seriously pissed… I plugged one or two keyboards in the other MIDI ports I had available and started to check if I was going to throw it by the window, try to go with the MOTU support which has a nasty reputation (not much hope with an expired warranty anyway), sell and buy something else… or go back to my rock solid Yamaha RS7000 sequencing days…
I’ve been lurking the web for solutions, only to find more people having no solutions with the same kind of issues with MOTU MIDI Interfaces… In all this pile of useless suggestions from people that don’t even own one of these, one was interesting… suggesting that it may be related to USB3 ports of the newer Macs… in fact, this was the solution…
Since I connected the XT to one of my display’s USB 2 port everything seems to hold on pretty tightly… even with light storms of MIDI notes and sync activated on every port (not that 8 MIDI ports represent what we can even call ‘bandwidth’) but… it’s clearly under the limit of USB 2. USB 3 was overkill anyway.
I’ll have to do some more testing (USB3 on another Mac, USB3 on PC) to see if it’s MOTU or Apple that is not supporting things correctly. Or more probably, since everything is working now, I’ll probably forget this until next time.
That leaves a bittersweet taste in my mouth… I still hate you XT… but I may forgive you.