Sunday 30 October 2011

What MIDI interface do we use to test our apps?

People are asking us what the best MIDI interface is for using our Symphonix Evolution app with MIDI hardware.  The answer is that we use a variety of interfaces, but the one we like the most is the the iRig MIDI from our friends at IK Multimedia.

The iRig MIDI is a hardware interface that plugs into the dock connector on the iPad or iPhone, and provides direct support for Core MIDI.  It's truly a "plug and play" solution and doesn't require any setup - just plug it in and go.  iRig is automatically detected by Symphonix Evolution and works without any need to set it up.

iRig has a number of advantages over a USB MIDI adapter:  It's low-latency so performance is slightly better for MIDI input.  The hardware-level Core MIDI support also provides more precise timing information along with the input data, so we can eliminate even more latency by compensating for the time lag between when data is received and when it is made visible to the app.

Better yet, the iRig works just fine on the iPhone, so you can load music into our Symphonix Evolution Player app and connect the MIDI output to your hardware while on the road.  (This overcomes a limitation with the USB Camera Connection Kit which only works on the iPad).

IK Multimedia also offers a number of other solutions that help with using the iPad or iPhone in a studio or stage environment.  In particular you might also want to check out the iKlip adapter, which makes it a snap to attach the iPad to a microphone stand.

As you can see, we use iKlip in our studio setup and it turns Symphonix Evolution into a touch control panel for the synth that's integrated nicely with the rest of our gear.

In the next posting we'll talk about what we've been up to for the last few weeks...There's some great enhancements coming soon!