[Khazul]

Originally Posted by Timo

Apparently the implementation of USB v1 is a lot simpler, and the tools for that standard are more widely available/accessible to developers.

USB v2 resources and documentation are supposedly more thinner on the ground and more complex to implement, which is why you tend to see more Firewire soundcards than USB 2. USB v2 is starting to pick up now it's becoming more understood and that better pre-composited drivers are written and becoming more accessible.

There also apparently the issue the USB2 had no provision for bandwidth reservation for audio - probably explains why most (if not all) USB2 audio cards seem to be glitchy as hell unless the chain is perfect.

USB1 does ahve this - so while alot slower and very limited can be a hell of alot more reliable.

Of course for multi channel audio - firewire is really the way to go I think. Reserved bandwidth channels.

Maybe thats really complex to implement. Anyway - everyone seems to be jumping on the USB audio (roland, korg etc) bandwagon now - I can soon see a time very soon when its going to become utterly crippling have more than one or two synths with this kind of integration via USB.

Bottom line - PLEASE remember us users who have a perfectly good reliable multi channel high bandwidth midi and audio interfaces allready - I really dont want millions of little midi and audio interfaces - it messes up PCs and causes huge overheads on both PCs and Macs. (10 device limit for old driver model)

I just want the usb to act as a private control and patch exchange channel nothing else - roland half got this right with the V-Synth (you can at least upload samples while the synth uses regular midi, but cant have both hardware and usb midi - grrrr) - Yamaha sadly messed up with the Motif ES (cant have both hardware midi and usb midi, but at least got the studio connection sofware to work over either) and Novation got it right with the remote series (midi and USB allways available).

On the TI - this translates in option to disable all USB audio paths, allow VC to do its excellent job of controlling the TI *BUT ALSO* enable the hardware midi ports as synth and NOT computer ports, and loose the delay compensation (which I can switch of in Cubase SX). OK - so I know theree is the clock source issue - simple - only accept clock from one source or the other, not both, but allow other midi from anywhere simultaneously

I wonder what the Radias and SH-201 are like in this respect - whether they are full USB audio plugins, or whether you can just use it as a editor, patch manager and aurtomation labeller and leave the thing working on regular MIDI and analog audio for notes in/out and audio in/out?

Originally Posted by Timo

Which begs the question why they didn't choose Firewire.

... We can can only guess they reserved it for TI v2.

People tend to have one or two firewire ports and loads of USB ports. Firewire is however chainable (unlike USB) as its a bus system, not a point to point system (as USB is). I think good firewire controllers are alot more expensive as well and probably not many people doing off the shelf implementations of the drivers - so *far* higher risk to implement.

Learning to write reliable drivers for computers is not a trivial task - alot of audio hardware companies are slowly finding this out with the flood of completely useless drivers around at the moment - at least Access had the good sense to buy in a known working driver set as far as I can tell (probably also why we have USB1 rather than 2 or firewire - probably the main).