Roland UM-1 USB-Midi Interface - Can it transfer sound?

As the title states, I'm kinda unclear on whether this thing is used only for transfer of midi notes or can it transfer the actual sound/sample as well?

Probably a laughable question but wth.

What I'm trying to do is track out to Ableton and arrange the sequences/songs there instead of within the MPC itself.

I'm sorry, but





No. A MIDI interface can only transmit MIDI.

You can do midi sample dump if the connected gear supports it, but that's still midi.

So you need midi headphones for that.

elektrik_muz wrote:You can do midi sample dump if the connected gear supports it, but that's still midi.

So you need midi headphones for that.

MIDI headphones I almost forgot about that one. You gotta love a forum where that's been uttered more than once.

I have Ensoniq disk tools that does MIDI sample dumps, yeah it's exceedingly rare a feature to find and it takes like 30 minutes to copy 2 drum hits. Machinedrum with the expansion is the only thing I've seen in recent times that uses that type of thing.

Midi data only as others have jokingly made clear.

Tell us what gear you have and we'll tell you what you need to get the audio (sound) into your computer.

Metatron72 wrote:I have Ensoniq disk tools that does MIDI sample dumps, yeah it's exceedingly rare a feature to find and it takes like 30 minutes to copy 2 drum hits. Machinedrum with the expansion is the only thing I've seen in recent times that uses that type of thing.

Jomox Xbase 999/888 does it, too.

Lol

Basically all I have at the moment is the MPC1000, a laptop, and a PC rig...and some speakers of course.

I probably need an audio interface such as the M-Audio ProFire 610?

importztek wrote:Lol

Basically all I have at the moment is the MPC1000, a laptop, and a PC rig...and some speakers of course.

I probably need an audio interface such as the M-Audio ProFire 610?

Yeah that would do the trick for your audio and give you a set of MIDI I/O. That's one of M-Audio's best offerings too especially considering the relatively low price.

Metatron72 wrote:

importztek wrote:Lol

Basically all I have at the moment is the MPC1000, a laptop, and a PC rig...and some speakers of course.

I probably need an audio interface such as the M-Audio ProFire 610?

Yeah that would do the trick for your audio and give you a set of MIDI I/O. That's one of M-Audio's best offerings too especially considering the relatively low price.

Do you know of a similar product made by a different company? I've read a ton of bad reviews on the FireWire 410 they put out. The 610 overwhelmingly better reviewed but I'm still skeptical...plus I don't think I even have a FireWire port on the laptop/PC. USB solution would be best.

importztek wrote:

Metatron72 wrote:

importztek wrote:Lol

Basically all I have at the moment is the MPC1000, a laptop, and a PC rig...and some speakers of course.

I probably need an audio interface such as the M-Audio ProFire 610?

Yeah that would do the trick for your audio and give you a set of MIDI I/O. That's one of M-Audio's best offerings too especially considering the relatively low price.

Do you know of a similar product made by a different company? I've read a ton of bad reviews on the FireWire 410 they put out. The 610 overwhelmingly better reviewed but I'm still skeptical...plus I don't think I even have a FireWire port on the laptop/PC. USB solution would be best.

Yeah if you have a laptop even if it has firewire, avoid firewire.

The Texas Instruments firewire chipsets got phased out by every pc manufacturer in favor of JMicron firewire chipsets. I am cursed with one on my laptop and no firewire HD I have has ever been useable. I tried 4 different interfaces, 2 didn't work at all, and the other 2 only worked with Reason using the emulated ASIO4All driver. One of the ones I tried was the 610 and it actually was surprisingly good.

What's your budget? Generally speaking Focusrite has some nice budget to mid priced offerings. If you can swing $749USD the RME Babyface is very nice.

http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_babyface.php

RME writes their own custom drivers and builds their interfaces around proprietary tech they came up with. Most USB interfaces have drivers adapted from a third party source and also what's called hidden buffers. These hidden sample buffers add to overall latency and aren't generally even shown in your DAW's latency settings. RME avoids all that with the way they design their gear.

At $549 there's the MOTU Ultralite Mk3. It's USB and firewire and like RME they do their own drivers and design with low latency in mind.

http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/ultralite-mk3

not sure what exactly motu does.. but I know mine uses an asio driver (it's called motu asio in the settings)

mr_debauch wrote:not sure what exactly motu does.. but I know mine uses an asio driver (it's called motu asio in the settings)

I've just always noticed a major increase in performance once you cross the $500 range. On PC almost all the interfaces are ASIO, I just have found in my experience (and a lot of benchmark tests bear it out) that RME and MOTU are amongst the cream in terms of features, build quality and rock solid drivers. Definitely worth spending a bit more on.