cannot route MIDI instrument sounds thru MOTU

[lawsongz]

Hello Everyone

Ive just bought a MOTU Traveler thru ebay recently to use with my intel-imac, which has WinXPPro setup through bootcamp. The audio part of Traveler works fine, though the MIDI is proving more tricky.

At fist i set the Traveler as my MIDI driver, until i realised that the Traveler does not have inbuilt MIDI sounds and so was just sending signals to the MIDI out port. Anyway...

So i changed the active MIDI driver to the standard Windows driver, called something like Microsoft Wavetable generator. When playing MIDI files, now i can hear the MIDI sounds come out of the imac built-in speakers. For the life of me, i cannot route the MIDI output through the MOTU system, like the audio signal does.

Im surprised this doesnt seem to be a common problem amongst intel-imac / MOTU users with WinXP. Im a MIDI orientated composer and wish to combine audio tracks with MIDI tracks using a multitracker. But i cannot seem to get the MIDI sounds (the instrument sounds, not the raw MIDI signals) and audio to both output together thru the MOTU.

How do people here usually output internal MIDI sounds (the sound, not the MIDI signal) through their MOTU ?

Are there any ideas or suggestions that may help me? Any help is much appreciated.

Alan.

PS - in macOS mode, the MIDI instrument sounds seem to output thru the MOTU no worries, so this seems to be a WinXP-specific problem.

[gameu]

You just have to set the default windows outputs to traveler 1-2 (look in the control panel)

[lawsongz]

Thank u very much gameu !

I will try that tonight and let people know how it goes.

Many thanks

Alan.

[lawsongz]

Hi Gameu and others,

I tried your good suggestion and made some progress, but in my case unfortunately the problem was not fixed.

The sound output of windows was originally set to "MOTU Analog" (traveler 1-2 was not an option). Now, on the MOTU setup window i ticked the box "Enable WDM drivers (less efficient)". Then i was suprised that "Traveler 1-2" become an option for windows output sound. I thought, bingo, this was my ticket to fixing the problem. But after testing the MIDI sounds still only come out of imac built-in speakers and not the MOTU. (general audio goes thru MOTU is fine) Im starting to think this may be a problem with the Internal Audio/MIDI Windows Driver, known as SigmaTel. This is the default driver installed with BootCamp. Then again, i dont really have a clue.

Do you think it may be possible to replace the SigmaTel driver with another generic windows MIDI driver? (hopefully free download)?
Any other ideas that may help me get around this predicament?

Alan.

[gameu]

I don't think you have a driver problem but rather something is not correctly setup. (in windows control panel?)
Why not forget the windows software synth (not really convincing in my opinion) and use inside your sequencer some of the free vst software synths you can find around?
Take a look at this site:
http://www.dontcrack.com/
Hope this will help

[lawsongz]

Thanks again Gameu

I'll keep looking around the Control Panel and see if i can get it working. Im going to also download the latest update of BootCamp next week (WinXP for imac), which has updated SigmaTel audio/MIDI driver. Hopefully that smooths things out.

Thanks for your advice on softsynths. I have other sounds to play with, like SampleTank, and call me a freak, but i love writing music with plain MIDI sounds (its a nostalgia thing). I also love listening the game soundtrack MIDI files. I'll see how things go next week when i get another chance the look at the MIDI setup. Computer bugs and anomalies can be very frustrating at times.

Thanks heaps for your time and help.

AL

[lawsongz]

PS, i will check out that website.
Thanks.
AL