I’m still having an occasional midi buffer overrun which causes BMT to hang. I can usually correct this by disconnecting the hub which interfaces between my APC Mini’s and the laptop, but unfortunately, sometimes this causes the various APC Mini’s to get different port assignments from what the assignments are before the problem occurs.
Can you tell me if port assignments are handled differently on a Mac compared to a PC? Would a Mac conceivably be able to know the actual device names or serial numbers of my APC Mini’s and thus create a more stable situation compared to the way Windows assigns ports (by assigning ports on the basis of which the order in which it ‘sees’ the devices)?
Hi Gabriel,
Before addressing the second issue, I’m thinking we need to understand why you are getting so many buffer overruns. USB ports should be able to handle the traffic unless somewhere in your setup there is a MIDI loop happening. If you do dynamic routing, it could occur when you are enabling a round that introduces this loop. If MT Pro hangs, maybe you can kill the process with task manager and then send us a crash dump. Please see this post on how to do that.
In my experience both Windows PC and Mac enumerates and assigns port based on their own logic. So I’m not convinced that you will not also have a similar issue if moving to a Mac.
Ideally these devices should have some sort of separate ID based on the hardware device. Then MT Pro would be able to uniquely identify each device.
In MIDI terms this is usually done by a SysEX device query but alas the APC-MINI does not respond to this message and I don’t think even at the USB level there is even a hardware ID (serial number) exposed.
Even if the device exposed it’s own ID, it would currently be a challenge to set up MT Pro to assign aliases based on a given ID. Maybe in the future, however until the hardware devices can provide this kind of information, it would probably not be worth it to develop an assignment mechanism of this nature in Bome MIDI Translator Pro.
As I said earlier, the best approach is perhaps to look into the root cause of the hangs.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
Thanks Steve. We’ve talked about this issue before, and I’m still struggling to understand why these overruns happen. I haven’t taken your advice to create a log file, but I’ll wait till it happens again and do that and send it to you.
