Incidentally, that LCD error is what the M-Audio Uno produced, before swapping to the UM-One.

your not gonna find the things you want in a pcie card etc. the world moved on a long long time ago.

If you want a modern module, buy an Roland Integra 7.

way too rich for my blood.

I was asking because i was having no luck finding myself.

So pci-e obviously doesn't exist, pci might if i really hunt for it, and it might or might not actually work in windows 10 on a modern chipset, which is why i was hoping someone else found one that actually did work on modern computers.

Without having a nice sound system, i want a stable and low latency solution for playing back xg and gs midi files as they were intended to be played on my computer. I have midis that will severely stress most software midi cables, and even the final fantasy 7 xg midis themselves have been known to trigger feedback detection in software midi cables, so i really wanted to avoid using that as a solution if at all possible.

foobar2000 works fine for playing back those xg midis with the famous portable vsti, but it takes ages to actually start a midi playing because it doesn't seem to keep the vsti loaded, unless i'm missing something.

Sorry, but what on earth do you mean by "software midi cables" ???

Midi doesn't need any higher transfer speed than the 32kbit/sec signalling rate that all the devices use. I'm not sure why you think you need low latency, high bandwidth devices (PCI/PCIe) and not just a simple usb/midi converter (yes there are some with issues, but there is a huge range of choice).

megatron-uk wrote on 2023-11-28, 23:13:

Sorry, but what on earth do you mean by "software midi cables" ???

I think he is taking about LoopBe. The free version has a nasty tendency to disable itself even during normal playback. Moreover its loopback detection cannot be configured. But as far as I know LoopMidi has no such problems.

@zaphod77:
You can try this:
Falcosoft Soundfont Midi Player + Munt VSTi + BassMidi VSTi
It keeps VSTi plugins open and you do not need software Midi cables for simple playback of XG/GS Midi files:
I think Phil's video explains best how to configure it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSk9S1bkRS8&t=502s

For XG use S-YXG50.
For GS use SC-VA.
For MT-32 use Munt or the built in Munt VSTi plugin.
For OPL3 you can use the built in OPL3 GM VSTi or ADLplug VSTi.

i can use vstis dirrectly just fine in foobar2000.

sc-va emulates a sc8810. and i don't have that. 😀

yeah i'm talking about free loopbe, and how it seems to just hang with regularity on playing anything complicated. one example of one of my midis is 65k for 1 minute and 35 seconds, whihc woudl probably choke it near instantly.

by low latency i mean for the synthesizing. i'm not talking about cable latency at all.

i will investigate loopmidi, as it seems that it's a signed driver after all, which should maybe actually be stable. that means i can just load up something in savihost. btu ther's still the matter of getting a true high quality sc55mkII without actually somehow finding one. 😀

i have a descent1 midi thats 162kb and plays no problem on all 3 of my GM hardware units with no latency going pc->(usb)->audio interface->(midi)->roland a880 midi patchbay->(midi)->unit x3

i feel like your trying to solve a problem thats not really a problem.

Okay it seems sound canvas va (which i somehow acquired) actually doesn't suck. only that and sy-xg50 seem to play back "jam and spoon - right in the night" correctly. And loopmdi does seem stable, at least when ther's not too much else goign on on my computer. will probably work better on my desktop.

Earlier VSC SHOULD be able handle it, but it's all wrong. the filter stuff simply doesn't happen at all, and the balance is way off. sound canvas va actually got it sounding better than SY-XG50 did, and sy-50xg did the file so well compared to VSC i was SURE it was XG and not GS, but the little light on the panel switched to GS!

Still need a proper sc55mkii VST that actually sounds like the real thing, with it's really powerful and resonant filter compared to other models.

Now I just need a stupidly lightweight and bare bones free midi player that uses system midi mapper and has a gm, gs, and an xg reset button on it, and a check box to enable auto reset. this player should ONLY play midis, and not have any silly library scanning that will eat cpu cycles and disk I/O. just outputs to system midi and does it well. foobar2k won't do system midi, though it will load VSTis without it and is pretty stable. vlc won't do system midi either (it uses fluidsynth, and wants a .sf2 file). windows media player (not groove) WILL do system midi, but it keeps wanting to do library scanning and autofilling metadata, which eats up cpu.

BloodyCactus wrote on 2023-11-29, 05:07:

i have a descent1 midi thats 162kb and plays no problem on all 3 of my GM hardware units with no latency going pc->(usb)->audio interface->(midi)->roland a880 midi patchbay->(midi)->unit x3

i feel like your trying to solve a problem thats not really a problem.

of course they play fine on hardware units. I just remember getting frustrated with trying to use those virtual midi cables and getting hanging notes and port muting when trying to use VSTis to playback midis, when things just worked with the old wdm xp drivers back in the day.

and i was talking about filesize divided by play time. say, if there was a 100k midi files that plays in 4 seconds, that would probably trip most feedback detectors in virtual midi cables. 😀

now not like i'm trying to go full Black Midi (i'm not sure any virtual midi cable is up for that task!)

zaphod77 wrote on 2023-11-29, 03:11:

i can use vstis dirrectly just fine in foobar2000.

You previously wrote:

foobar2000 works fine for playing back those xg midis with the famous portable vsti, but it takes ages to actually start a midi playing because it doesn't seem to keep the vsti loaded

That's why I responded:
It keeps VSTi plugins open and you do not need software Midi cables for simple playback

Now I just need a stupidly lightweight and bare bones free midi player that uses system midi mapper and has a gm, gs, and an xg reset button on it, and a check box to enable auto reset. this player should ONLY play midis, and not have any silly library scanning that will eat cpu cycles and disk I/O. just outputs to system midi and does it well.

Again:
Falcosoft Soundfont Midi Player + Munt VSTi + BassMidi VSTi

zaphod77 wrote on 2023-11-29, 05:39:

and i was talking about filesize divided by play time. say, if there was a 100k midi files that plays in 4 seconds, that would probably trip most feedback detectors in virtual midi cables. 😀

That's not possible. The signalling rate of 32kbits/sec multiplied by 4 seconds is 168kbits or 21kbytes. That's absolute maximum. In reality it will be less than that due to headers and other (possible) structures in the midi file like embedded sysex data, but it's still never going to push more than 32kbits/sec; if it tries to, then the player and file is out of spec, and any Midi compliant device will fail with it.

There are plenty of files out there that will exhaust the 31250kbaud MIDI data rate, and are only playable via softsynths, DAWs and other methods that are not bound to actual MIDI UART data rate, for example SW60PC sound card which can accept data couple times faster than UART speed.

yeah i pulled that number out of my hat, but i really did run into lots of trouble trying to get stable playback before, and a software midi cable by nature would eat up some cpu.

i just noticed that it was really slow loading my midi files when using a vsti, but when using other options like libadlmid, they load right up, and that settings changed aren't getting saved, and that when i press the configure button to get the panel for the VSTi to pop up, it's always a FRESH panel, even if a midi file is playing. so forgive me for the conclusion. actually i'd really like to see the vst panel during playback optionally. anyway to do that in foobar2k? savihost does a fine job with that.

things seem to work a bit better today, but i'm still getting pauses of a second or two before the midi file even starts playing at all after it loads with a spinny circle, almost like foobar is loading the instruments the first time they are needed, while if i load the vsti with savihost, it takes a while at the start but it loads everything up, and then response is good.

and i don't doubt falcosoft midi player can play back to system midi and pick automatic reset type, but i was looking for something much more bare bones. no integrated synths at all. really small exe. something that loads damn near instantly and opens midi files really quickly, and lets me hit the reset button manually for the type i want when needed. When using roland synths, i'd want auto gs reset genreally, while i would probable want toggleable auto GM reset for the sy-xg50, and the ability to manually force a gs reset to playback a gs midi that forgot the GS reset.

zaphod77 wrote on 2023-11-29, 16:56:

yeah i pulled that number out of my hat, but i really did run into lots of trouble trying to get stable playback before, and a s […]
Show full quote

yeah i pulled that number out of my hat, but i really did run into lots of trouble trying to get stable playback before, and a software midi cable by nature would eat up some cpu.

i just noticed that it was really slow loading my midi files when using a vsti, but when using other options like libadlmid, they load right up, and that settings changed aren't getting saved, and that when i press the configure button to get the panel for the VSTi to pop up, it's always a FRESH panel, even if a midi file is playing. so forgive me for the conclusion. actually i'd really like to see the vst panel during playback optionally. anyway to do that in foobar2k? savihost does a fine job with that.

things seem to work a bit better today, but i'm still getting pauses of a second or two before the midi file even starts playing at all after it loads with a spinny circle, almost like foobar is loading the instruments the first time they are needed, while if i load the vsti with savihost, it takes a while at the start but it loads everything up, and then response is good.

and i don't doubt falcosoft midi player can play back to system midi and pick automatic reset type, but i was looking for something much more bare bones. no integrated synths at all. really small exe. something that loads damn near instantly and opens midi files really quickly, and lets me hit the reset button manually for the type i want when needed. When using roland synths, i'd want auto gs reset genreally, while i would probable want toggleable auto GM reset for the sy-xg50, and the ability to manually force a gs reset to playback a gs midi that forgot the GS reset.

I promise it's the last time I react but it's hard to understand why you have not just tried it instead of listing features seemingly not available (but in reality they are).
E.g the exe size is less than 400k, loads immediately, does not load its own synth unless you explicitly ask it to do it. And finally the manual reset button is right there on the right side of the player...

I just grabbed it, and the exe is 886,304 bytes. 😀

Again nothing against you, but i am seriously disappointed there isn't some stupidly simple windows player that would fit on a 360k floppy.

I'm looking for a potato midi player, if that makes any sense. 😀

zaphod77 wrote on 2023-11-30, 02:11:

I just grabbed it, and the exe is 886,304 bytes. 😀

That is the 64-bit version... The 32-bit version is 444, 416 bytes. But even the 64-bit version still fits on 1.44 floppy 😀. Moreover it's portable so requires no installation (just copy anywhere and it runs) as well as it's a native exe so it has no dependencies on various frameworks (.NET) or even MS VC++ runtime libraries.
You will not find a "potato" Midi player that has "non-potato" features such as manual Reset with selectable SysEx types and so on...

zaphod77 wrote on 2023-11-30, 02:11:

I just grabbed it, and the exe is 886,304 bytes. 😀

Again nothing against you, but i am seriously disappointed there isn't some stupidly simple windows player that would fit on a 360k floppy.

I'm looking for a potato midi player, if that makes any sense. 😀

What you're looking for doesn't exist unless you have real midi hardware. Using soundfonts or VSTis on any midi player or DAW is gonna need some reasonable processing power to prevent stuttering, latency issues etc. If you really don't want to get an SC-55, MU80 or other midi hardware, then your only choice is to use Falcosoft's midi player and set it up as Falcosoft described above. The SCVA is going to be by far the closest you'll get to a real SC-55, all the SC-55 soundfonts and emulators out there at the moment don't come anywhere near the SCVA in terms of accuracy. The SCVA isn't perfect, but it's really, really close. The only thing that sounds exactly like an SC-55 is an SC-55. Not even my SC-88Pro sounds exactly like an SC-55 in SC-55 compatibility mode.

Follow Falcosoft's suggestion of watching Phil's Youtube video on how to set up a PC to be an all-in-one Roland/Yamaha/sountfont/MT-32 device. Do what I did, grab yourself a Dell Wyse or other ultra small form factor PC, they're roughly the size of a real SC-55, in fact, even smaller and set it up as per Phil's video. It uses up a tiny amount of space and power, it's infinitely configurable, and you can use it with an XT/Amiga/ST all the way up to a 13th Gen i9, basically anything that can send midi data. Short of getting real midi hardware, it's the next best thing. The other great thing about Falcosoft's midi player is that you can save the settings for whichever VST plug in you use. For example using the SCVA, you can set it to SC-55 mode and save it, so the next time you start it up, it automatically sets itself to SC-55 mode instead of the default SC-8820 mode.

I'm well aware it will probably be a non issue when i get back to my desktop, but i tried loopmidi+windows media player, and i was getting unsteady playback because it just would NOT STOP pegging my hard drive and trying to fill metadata, and figured surely SOMEONE would have gotten annoyed by such things and bashed together SOMETHING.

Yeah, if i had money i'd be seriously tempted to do something fancy, but my motive here is nostalgia on a budget, and right now my laptop isn't that powerful. Hence me wanting a seriously low spec midi player to make up for the cpu being used on the softsynth and midi cable. or a waveblaster style integrated hardsynth to do xg and or gs properly out my headset or laptop speakers when i get the hankering to listen to some music.

if i hadn't originally had a sw60xg card in a desktop, i probably wouldn't care so much about trying to bring back the experience on my current PC.

zaphod77 wrote on 2023-11-30, 17:38:

it just would NOT STOP pegging my hard drive and trying to fill metadata

sounds more like something is wrong with your pc if playing as midi file makes you think its pegging the hard drive trying to fill metadata...

nobody else is having issues playing midi files

if you don't load up media player for ages, it scans all of your mp3 files an whatnot and tries to fill in album information and go grab album covers. fine if you use it on a regular basis, and actually care about such things. And when i struggled to actually find the file menu, i managed to accidentally tell it to scan my 4 tb external hard drive, and couldn't tell it to STOP. All because i had to look up a hotkey just to get the main menu bar to show up so i could use file/open to open a midi to test with.

It wasn't the midi playback doing it, it was the media player helpfully searching my computer for mp3 files to download album information for.