Topic: laptop midi hardware setup?

Hi all,

I did a search and didn't find a topic on this question -- please excuse (and post links :) if one exists.  I hope this thread will provide answers to others who are just beginning to explore midi on their laptops and don't know how the hardware setup works.

I have a Dell XPS m1330 laptop and will be acquiring a Yamaha cp33 keyboard shortly.  I would like to use the piano as a midi controller, but am unsure how the hardware connects together.

Another big component here is that I am running Ubuntu Linux.  I am looking for general midi controller (spec. yamaha cp33) and laptop interface advice, and also for Linux-specific hardware advice if you have any.

My laptop has an integrated sound card with headphone/line out, mic in, and also 2 usb ports, and 1 four-pin firewire port.

Here's what I am envisioning:

cp33 > laptop w/ pianoteq and/or sequencer/notation > powered stereo speakers?

Does an external audio interface need to fit in here?  If so, USB vs firewire?

cp33 > external interface > laptop > external interface > powered stereo speakers

is it possible both ways?  would one or the other provide lower latency and/or higher sound quality?

tia,
ethanay

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

Hi ethanay,

I was using a USB-MIDI interface for connection to my P70, and a cheap Behringer FCA202 on FireWire as audio interface. The FCA202 is rather inexpensive but works quite well, low latency, low noise. There are a lot of USB MIDI boxes and small interfaces, most of them dont work longer than some months, for any reason. So you should invest some more bucks at this point. This is a stable configuration and easy to handle.

Rainer

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

Start cheap and then buy gear when you need it.  The simplest setup (and the one that requires no extra purchases) is the first possibility you suggested.  Depending on the quality of your soundcard, this be a no-go, since a lot of laptop sound interfaces are pretty much - and suffer from high latency, noise interference from cooling fans/hard drive, etc.  Buying a dedicated external usb-midi interface makes absolutely no sense, since the keyboard you're getting already does usb-midi natively.

If you get an external soundcard, I highly advise going with firewire.  Although the extra speed and bursting capabilities won't make that large of a difference, you will get better latency, and moreover, it frees traffic on the usb bus.  Before you make such an investment, though, you really need to do your research.  I've owned many many soundcards, and it took me a long time to find one that suited my needs.


As for linux, I don't want to hijack this thread, so I'll just say that the easiest way to get everything running is to put a copy of XP on there and dual boot.  If you want to spend your evenings re-compiling kernel modules and trying to figure out why wine sucks so much, then run linux.  If you want to play the piano, then run windows and learn to live with its respective shortcomings.

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

You will want a good external sound card. Notebook sound cards are a problem partly because they are almost decent, in the same way that well-recorded mp3 files are almost decent. If you listen to them often, they can sound good, but you won't realize how much you're missing. The difference when playing PianoTeq is particularly telling--with a laptop sound card many of the harmonics will be cut and the sense of playing a real instrument is greatly reduced in all kinds of subtle ways. I'm using one of the USB sound cards that others here are disappointed with--a Tascam US-144. No problems here, although I admit I've only had it six months. If other people are getting better results with firefire, go with firewire.

About the actual setup: With a USB soundcard, the midi keyboard is not plugged into the soundcard at all. The chain is instead:

Midi keyboard > computer with PianoTeq > externalUSB soundcard > headphones\monitors.

Most external USB sound cards do have midi ports, but you won't need them for playing PianoTeq or any sampler\VSTI.  These midi ports are there just in case you have an older pre-USB system or for playing a rompler keyboard's sounds--you might have a midi arrangement on the computer, for example, and want to have the keyboard "play" it using its own piano sound.

Last edited by Jake Johnson (06-05-2008 22:27)

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

Wow, thanks to all the thoughtful responses.  I think that covered a lot of the questions I had regarding how this all works together.

Here's a followup question:  Is this an external firewire sound card?  I hear people talking about "audio interfaces" and "external soundcards" -- are they the same thing or a different thing?

The reason why I am asking about Echo is that I understand from here that Echo is cooperating with open-source firewire audio driver development.  In which case, I would have no problems supporting them if they make a quality product.

Secondly, to accommodate future expansions in my setup, I know that the Audiofire2 is relatively simple.  If I want to do complex recording w/several mics, couldn't I just run everything through a mixer and then send that combined signal to something like the Audiofire2, rather than purchasing a larger, more complex audio interface (e.g., the Audiofire8/12)?

thanks much for the help thus far!

in case it is helpful to anyone else, here is the link to a similar discussion in UbuntuForums (linux-focused)

ethanay

Last edited by ethanay (06-05-2008 22:38)

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

ethanay: the link you posted goes to a dead page.

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

try it now   a little error in entry to make it look pretty

edit:  Ahh, I think I see now re: my question above about a simple vs complex interface...the complex ones let you record more than two separate tracks.  If I ran several inputs into a mixer and then into something like the Audiofire2, I would only get two tracks at a time... (or however many the audio card can receive/send)?

Last edited by ethanay (08-05-2008 02:50)

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

just as an update, I've downloaded the trial version just to see if it works at all on my laptop:

Dell XPS m1330
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.5ghz
2gb ram
Intel "high definition audio"
Ubuntu 8.04, running WINE

it installed without a hitch. very cool.  I started it up and it gave me a warning, something along the lines of: "you are using DirectX, which is high latency -- install an ASIO driver."  The latency is definitely obvious -- but that can be fixed later.  I've had it open for a couple hours now and it hasn't crashed or anything.  No messing around needed on my part.

Re: the sound -- I know I am using it through my internal sound system, but I am hearing an annoying sound at the onset and into the decay of each note and especially dissonant groups of notes.  Not sure how to describe it -- a high-pitched phasy overlay that makes both the attack and sustain sound "fake."  It's also present in the demo mp3's from the website, although much more subtle.  To what extent is this inevitable from modeling vs sampling, and to what extent is it the low-end audio hardware?

With that said, the subtlety and nuances are still amazing between this and the Yamaha Clavinovas that I tried a few days ago.  Wow.  I can't believe its hardware requirements are so low.

Does anyone recommend running through a mixer before going to the external speakers, or will plugging speakers directly into an external audio card be enough to get the most out of this thing?

it gives me a performance index of 14.

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

My experience has been that the sound card makes a huge difference: on my laptop's internal sound card, I sometimes got a sound similar to what you describe. My impression is that the relatively narrow frequency response and bit rate sensitivity cause the laptop sound card both to leave out low and high frequencies and to conflate both the frequencies and amplitudes of the partials. Variations in the frequencies and their respective amplitudes thus get lost.

The result is synthy timbres. You can, of course, get a synth-like, sine-wavish tone, from PianoTeq, but the acoustic piano presets won't give you this timbre on a good sound card. (The demo's on the website, may, may, might be from an older version of PianoTeq???)

In addition, most laptop sound cards just won't give you enough volume to hear the variations in the amplitudes of the partials.  (This last consideration is not small. Even with my good external sound card, if I set the volume much under half, a lot of the realism is lost, since upper partials across the keyboard fall in amplitude so fast, and the physical presence of the bass vanishes.)

The other big consideration is monitors\headphones. No piano will sound really good solo over bad headphones or monitors. Good headphones, and monitors with large cones, are needed to hear a good piano well. One sound guy once told me that he would never use anything less than a 14" cone in the monitors for a piano where the piano would be played solo. I don't play out, and I've used, and use at home, monitors with smaller cones, but large ones do make a difference. Monitors are another complex thing to consider, though: the size of the cones isn't the only issue, since they too have different frequency responses and too often they may be great for treble or bass, but suffer in the midrange. Often, people use an eq board to make them give you the sound that you want. I'm still learning about them myself. I'm posting a question in another thread.

Re: laptop midi hardware setup?

Just as an update:

The CP33 works out of the box immediately with Ubuntu Linux, no extra drivers/setup required (except maybe on the piano's end of things).  All I did was plug in the usb cord and turn on the piano and it was recognized.  It was also recognized immediately through WINE, although the latency made it impossible to do any real-time recording.

My soundcard arrived, but I haven't tried it yet as I will be installing 64Studio w/a dedicated realtime kernel and using a dual-boot setup instead of configuring Ubuntu to do double-duty (things can get messy that way...).

Right now I plan on using Seq24 for creating midi files (mostly in real-time; piano performances) which I can then export to audio.  It seems to be a simple and solid program that does what it intends to do very well.  If anyone has other suggestions for Linux sequencers that aren't big complicated things then I would love to hear them.