SysEx timeouts

[halifax30]

I have an MD unit and MIDI driver which works reliably, but there are 3 cases where I always get a Sysex Timeouts in MDM. These cases are:

• When I press the 'Send All' button at the top-left of the MDM screen.
• When I do a 'Save To Slot' when the 'Synchronized' checkbox is on.
• When I press the 'Send All' button in the 'Pads' group.

The timeout seems to happen always the same way:

1. I press one of the above buttons.
2. A yellow 'Sysex Wait' message appears.
3. The progress bar appears and gradually advances to 96%. During this the MD unit indicates that it is receiving chunks of data. By chunks I mean that the red LED stays on for shorter or longer periods (1-4 sec) and between them it turns off for about 1 sec.
4. When the progress bar reaches 96% it stays there, and the MD unit is still receiving data. It seems that after 96% percent is reached, MD receives more chunks of data (sometimes 3, sometimes much more than that) before MDM displays 'SysEx Timeouts'.

I've seen that many people have this problem but I could not find a solution which worked for me.
Previously, I had had regular timeouts in MDM when I edited Pads, but after I increased Options->SysEx Delay to 70ms (and later to 100ms), those timeouts were gone. However, I've never managed to make the above 'Send All' buttons to work.
My MD is connected to my desktop PC with a 3 metre USB cable. I tried to plug the cable into different ports, but it did not help.
I would be grateful for any useful suggestions.

[angr77]

What kind of MD are you using?

Best regards

Angr77

[halifax30]

It is a 56-input MD in aluminium case made a few weeks ago by Dmitri with PS-board and colour LCD. Is this the info you need?

[angr77]

Ok. Reason for asking...You never know what kind of MD's people are using. It could have been some old platform. Now you have a 120MHZ Arm-based version.

I have not seen any timeout problems since my move to the ARM based version of the MD. On the older ATMega based platform like 1284 etc I had always problems like that on certain systems. Not all for some reason.

Default is 30 ms on the sys ex delay.

You do use the the same port for midi in/out in MDM? MD port 1 for MDM and MD Port 2 in AD2.

A common problem is often when not using separate ports in different softwares...then problems occur when two softwares tries to work through the same midi port.

Angr77

[dmitri]

I also would suggest that MDM uses one of MegaDrum MIDI In/Out ports exclusively, i.e. no other soft is using the same ports. Often the default for many MIDI soft is to bind to all available MIDI ports.

[halifax30]

For MDM I use the following ports:

Code: Select all

In: Megadrum USB MIDI
Out: Megadrum USB MIDI

For AD2 I use the following ports:

Code: Select all

In: MIDIIN2 (Megadrum USB MIDI)
Out: MIDIOUT2 (Megadrum USB MIDI)

These are the names that I can select in MDM->Options.
Actually, I had regular timeouts since day one with this unit. When I increased sys ex delay to 70ms I had no more timeouts with Live update or when sending individual Pads. But SendAll or SendAllPads has never worked. In very rare cases it succeeded, but in 99% of cases it didn't. I'm using the latest Windows 10 and a 3m long USB cable. I'm not sure if it matters.
I'm pretty sure that two applications are not using the same MIDI port. I believe it is impossible. When I tried to use the same port in MDM and AD2, the one I started later couldn't open the port. To overcome that I first tried to use LoopMidi but later I realized (to my big relief) that the MD USB driver provides 2 ports by default. Since then my MIDI configuration looks like above.

[dmitri]

Can you try swapping ports between MDM and AD2?

[halifax30]

I tried doing SendAll with In+Out = "Megadrum USB MIDI" and In+Out = "MIDIIN2/MIDIOUT2 (Megadrum USB MIDI)" with both 30ms and 70ms SysEx Delay several times and in all cases I 'reliably' got a SysexTimeouts message.

[dmitri]

Ok, when I'm back I'll try to reproduce it with Windows 10.

[halifax30]

As a test, I created a custom version of MDM. I allowed myself to enter a SysEx Delay greater than 100ms. I entered 250ms and tried to do SendAll.
The progress bar moved much slower. Previously I said that MD received the data in chunks and the LED was constantly on for the duration of each chunk. With a delay of 250ms the LED flashed during each chunk, suggesting that it received the data much slower. Between chunks the LED switched off, like before. The progress bar stopped for a long time at 96%, like before. During this 4-5 chunks of data arrived to MD and I finally got the 'Sysex Timeouts' message. So obviously a bigger SysEx Delay did not help.
I'm not sure if I mentioned (or if it matters) but I only get the error at the very end.
I start to believe that something is not correct with the Timeout detection in MDM. I started to look at the Java code to understand how it works but it was too complicated. I'm going to take a second look at it when I will have time.