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Is my Luna II v2.5 faulty?

I am getting Midi Sysex communication errors whilst trying to send patches and bulk dumps to my Doepfer Drehbank (Midi Controller) and Kurzweil K2000, using SoundDiver, Cubase or Drehbank software.

Win98SE (freshly installed - no Midi loopback drivers!)
LunaII in slot 3 (tried slot 1 and 3)
ASUS CUSL2-C with onboard 815e graphics
PIII 1GHz
256MB (CL-3)
10GB UDMA66
3COM3C905 Network card (slot 1 or 6)
BIOS defaults (tried all sorts of recomended settings/tweaks in here also)

The Drehbank crashes as soon as I start sending it sysex. The K2000 display gets garbled and patches are all screwed up. The Midi sysex on my old SoundblasterLive card used to work perfectly!.

Spent a lot of time trying all sorts of win98 tweaks (recomended links/tips from this forum and others)- no joy, and even installed the Luna II in another PC (clean install Win98SE then WinME) to see if the Midi Sysex communication would work, but it was the same! constant errors. ASUS P2B-F, PIII 500MHz, 128MB, (Lots of PCI cards).

Please help !!!

Hi,

I've read somewhere about your problem (and mine, as well - I tried to dump samples from my mac to Yamaha A3000 sampler with error messages; also tried to dump all selfmade patches from my EA1 synth to backup them in my computer) and there is no way to bypass it... As we can see there is no way to send sysex messages using CW OMS driver, yet. Let's hope it will be fixed in the 3.0 soft release...

i was just trying to update the OS in my virus b last night, using sounddiver and my luna, and it was giving me a hell of a time... losing sync... incomplete buffers... it f*%ked with me for 2+ hours.

good thing i didn't get rid of my SBlive yet!

will this same flaw be a problem when recording knob movements (also sysex data) into logic? if it made sounddiver crash (also an emagic product), i'm hoping logic will handle it w/o any issues or conflicts.

...frankie g

ps - i'm really grateful that this board is up with a searchable index -- great resource!

hey frankie

I've updated synths successfully using a Pulsar1 midi port before; here's how:

1. Be sure you're using the latest version of the software (2.04a for pulsar, 2.5 for luna is what's on the site, but I think I've been sending out 2.51(?) with the cards). Be sure you've got the "newest midi driver" in your project by removing Pulsar Midi Source (or Luna Midi Source), and readding it from the Hardware Devices directory.

2. When sending large SysEx you *MUST* not be sending Midi Clock - be sure to disable this within your sequencer before dumping it...

The first few times I tried to dump SysEx through my MOTU 8x8 interface, it took me hours too, and ironically I was glad to have the Pulsar around since it worked. Hopefully this helps, if not you might want to email support@creamware.com - and if you think it's a bug, then support@creamware.de should be notified.

"Be sure you're using the latest version of the software" -- i bought the card from you about a month ago

about deleting and adding the module... shouldn't it newest one already be in the project? which driver is being loaded up by the default project that i've been basing all my other projects on? [just curious]

also -- how's the latency of that MOTU compare to that of the pulsar?

...frankie g

ps - you were right -- i DO like this card

Well you never know

My MOTU I picked up for a good deal, its a MOTU MidiExpress XT 8x8 midi interface. I have been eyeing the eMagic AMT8 or Unitor8mk2 to replace this, but MOTU recently came out with WDM/2k/XP drivers for this one, so I have no reason to switch -- plus this one doesn't have a stupid wall wart! Just your standard PC power cable. I lose the AMT timing stuff with Logic, though, and I don't think it's MultiClient (but I usually only run Logic & Pulsar anyway as far as MIDI goes).

Yeah, if you installed your Luna off the CD, you should have the newest version. I am just complete for the sake of being complete, you never know when someone is going to search & find this a few months down the road only they have a Pulsar instead (and if you've had Pulsar 1.x installed then install 2.x, I've had weird issues where the default projects had older devices in them -- easily fixed by my suggestion to reload the MIDI port).

I hope you get it to work -- report back. I guess I should try it with my own Luna when I get home.

I knew you'd like it Have you played much with any of the synths yet?

well... i reloaded the midi drivers, opened sounddiver, started the OS transfer, and it still was giving me checksum errors, stalled transmissions, and frozen windows...

so i installed my SBlive drivers once again and lo-and-behold, it worked fine.

i guess this is one to write to creamware tech support about, because SOMETHING's buggy.

...frankie g

support@creamware.de for bug reports remember. The US Creamware office doesn't write the software...

I'll try with my Luna tonight Frankie, and see if I'm getting the same thing, if I am, I'll write a bug report too.

i think it might have something to do with the huge size of the midi file that it was transferring -- it was doing fine until about 40% of the way thru the transfer

I've updated a Waldorf Q and Waldorf XT using my Pulsar1's midi port...

Try slowing down the sequencer to like 60 bpm.

sounddiver doesn't give you that option, i don't think...

i couldn't get it to work in logic either, but it's all good... it was just easier to install it with something i knew worked (sounddiver/sblive).

...frankie g

Hi,

There is a bug in the Sequencer MIDI source, so that data gets corrupted when a large amount of data is sended in a short time. This happens normaly only when sending large chunks of sysex. This is fixed in Pulsar 3.0

best
Markus