Daisy-chaining is generally a no-no. You could probably get or easily make a MIDI splitter. As for getting the audio back into your card, that's a little harder as you'd need to fabricate a mixer or a switchbox of some kind... I suppose you might be able to get away with just using a 3.5 splitter (Sending both the MT-32 and SC-55 into the Line-In) provided both devices were not powered on at the same time.

AFAIK daisy chaining midi devices works great and has no disadvantages at least for games.
You need another midi cable that connects the midi thru port with the midi-in of the next midi device in the chain.
Also I *think* you can daisy-chain the line-out through the SC-55 mkII similarily. In that case I'd make the sc55 the first in the midi chain as well. But I haven't tried that, only read about it when I asked how to chain my mt32, cm64 and sc55. Since it's three devices I opted for a chinch switch to sort the line mess. The Midis are chained, though.

HighTreason wrote:

Daisy-chaining is generally a no-no. You could probably get or easily make a MIDI splitter. As for getting the audio back into your card, that's a little harder as you'd need to fabricate a mixer or a switchbox of some kind... I suppose you might be able to get away with just using a 3.5 splitter (Sending both the MT-32 and SC-55 into the Line-In) provided both devices were not powered on at the same time.

Thanks. Are there any MIDI splitters and Audio Splitters that I can purchase that you'd recommend for this task?

And, out of academic curiosity, why is daisy-chaining a no-no?

All depends on what you wanna do. The disadvantage of daisy chaining is that the MIDI receiving units must be turned on. Usually this is no problem for me for my guitar rig, cause i'l need the gear all at the time and changes patches on the fly. For playing DOS games with MIDI units i personally prefer using a dedicated MIDI through box, the basic ones usually have at least 4 OUT ports.

You can daisy chain, run a MIDI cable from the MIDI through of the MT-32 to the MIDI IN of the SC-55. But you'll need the MT-32 always on to repeat those MIDI messages to the SC-55. Get a small box MIDI through instead. You won't regret it.

To split the audio use a mixer.

I have three units connected via MIDI THRU. The MPU401AT goes into the MT-32 (Old) first, then MIDI THRU to the CM-32L then that MIDI THRU to the SC-55.

I have a little audio switch box to select between the outputs and the output of the switch box goes into a 4 channel Stereo mixer allowing me to mix Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold (speech) and also CD Audio externally.

Here I cover daisy chaining in my 3h MT-32 tutorial: http://youtu.be/5NUQpAZeAdo?t=1h42m40s

Here I'm reviewing a 4 port MIDI splitter: http://youtu.be/w9lt4Lk-kL8

Windows also supports several MIDI adapters, so you could just get a few cheap USB MIDI adapters and switch via DOSBox config file entries between them.

The use of MIDI THRU ports has been discussed on this forum, and others, a number of times. A nice visual of the latency incurred by chaining MIDI devices is shown in the late 1980's-published book, "Mind Over MIDI."

As depicted, each MIDI THRU port in a chain introduces compounding latency. To some folks, 5 - 6ms of delay is audible, so a general recommendation would be to not chain more than three devices together. I adhere to this myself with my own MIDI network.

That said, if the intent is to only have one device sounding at any particular time (as concerns most gaming applications), I'd suggest that you can chain beyond this number to a usable degree. My own testing of both wireless MIDI (RS-232) and audio transceivers resulted in some ~26ms of latency. From a gaming perspective, even a delay this large is hardly noticeable.

Thanks. We could use a Midi FAQ here 😉

As for the OPs question, he should be very fine with just two devices and gaming only needs 😉

Dominus wrote:

Thanks. We could use a Midi FAQ here 😉

Oh, we could use A LOT OF FAQs here! 😀
There' are so many useful threads with trivial (and some not so trivial) information spread on the forum, it's hard to keep track of them all.

Btw I daisy-chain two modules myself, MT-32 and SC-55mkII, but only use one at a time, so never noticed any delay.