MIDI over direct USB connection between two computers?

Question

MIDI over direct USB connection between two computers?

I'm trying to find out if it's possible to send MIDI between two computers using a direct USB to USB connection (no MIDI interface). I have not seen this done before, I don't think, but I don't know why it shouldn't be possible.

Thanks for any tips on making this work. I want to connect several computers together to control sound and video for a theatre production, to be triggered from a single MIDI source.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Feb 3, 2008 7:11 PM

Reply

Answer 1

jaap

Level 2

470 points

Feb 6, 2008 8:55 AM in response to Matt Rogalsky

Hi,

I don't think there's something for midi over USB; however, there is an experimental tool for midi over Ethernet. It's called iMidi, and it's written foor PPC, and there's no native Intel version. I tried it with my PPC eMac and Intel iMac, but it took a lot of processing power 😟
See http://openmuse.org/transport/mip_oview.html for more info.
You could also use a midi thru box and 2 midi interfaces to trigger 2 Macs with 1 midi source.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards,
Jaap

Reply

Answer 2

Feb 18, 2008 12:15 PM in response to jaap

I never did find a way to MIDI-connect two machines with direct USB but I did find a good alternative using ethernet cables and a network hub. It was a simple matter to set up a network MIDI port for each machine using Audio MIDI Setup. It could have been done wirelessly, and I successfully tested that, but I was concerned about stability of connections while running several interconnected machines for a theatre show. The wired solution worked flawlessly.

Reply

Answer 3

jmymlr

Level 1

40 points

Feb 18, 2008 7:00 PM in response to Matt Rogalsky

By the way, it's generally not good to connect two computers via usb unless you have some sort of crossover cable specifically for that purpose. USB uses a host-device communication protocol where the computer (the host) controls all of the data transfer with the devices (ex. audio interface, keyboard, thumb drive, etc.). If you connected one computer to another computer via USB, there would be a conflict because each one would be trying to act as the host.

You could transfer MIDI over firewire (a peer-to-peer protocol), but that would be the same procedure as using ethernet.

Reply