OK, school me: why would one want to make a 1X12 thru 1X8?
as in.. why would anyone need such a device?
Because not all midi devices have Midi Thru jacks.
We'll use Piggy as an example:
you have 1 midi output.. but 8 midi channels to take advantage of (or 16 via channel switching)
Lets say you have 8 synths that have midi but aren't Multi-Timbral (meaning they can't have more than 1 track being sequenced at a time).
Perfect example.. Roland Juno-106. Kick ass synth. Polyphonic, but not Multi-Timbral. And i dont think the concept of Midi Thru was
established quite yet.
1st question... What is a Midi Thru? (answer copied from wiki)
"MIDI-THRU ports started to be added to MIDI-compatible equipment soon after the introduction of MIDI, in order to improve performance. The MIDI-THRU port avoids the aforementioned retransmission delay by linking the MIDI-THRU port to the MIDI-IN socket almost directly. The difference between the MIDI-OUT and MIDI-THRU ports is that data coming from the MIDI-OUT port has been generated on the device containing that port. Data that comes out of a device's MIDI-THRU port, however, is an exact duplicate of the data received at the MIDI-IN port.
Such chaining together of instruments via MIDI-THRU ports is unnecessary with the use of MIDI "patch bay," "mult" or "Thru" modules consisting of a MIDI-IN connector and multiple MIDI-OUT connectors to which multiple instruments are connected. Some equipment has the ability to merge MIDI messages into one stream, but this is a specialized function and is not universal to all equipment. MIDI Thru Boxes clean up any skewing of MIDI data bits that might occur at the input stage. MIDI Merger boxes merge all MIDI messages appearing at either of its two inputs to its output, which allows a musician to plug in several MIDI controllers"
To sum it all up...
It basically multiplies the number of "midi out's" on what ever device you plug it into(in this case,piggy on gp2x) so that you can use more than midi controllable device.
the 1x12 part is cool because if you have 8 synths plugged in you can plug 4 more on to sync to midi clock.
So thats 12 devices slaving to the gp2x.. which is pretty sick in my opinion.
Last edited by low-gain (Apr 22, 2010 7:15 pm)