Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer And Audiofile Engineering MIDI Surface: A Gearwire Pro Review скачать в хорошем качестве

Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer And Audiofile Engineering MIDI Surface: A Gearwire Pro Review

At last, you can plug a MIDI cable into your iPhone. The Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer ($69.99) is the first—and so far, only—hardware MIDI interface for iDevices. (I also tested it on my iPad and 2G iPod Touch.) This matchbook-size interface slots into the iPhone/iPod/iPad dock connector, enabling you to transmit MIDI data to and from compatible apps over standard MIDI connectors. That's a big deal, because it opens the iPhone and its brethren to the untold millions of hardware synthesizers, effects, controllers, and other MIDI gear out there. (For simplicity, I'll refer to iPhone, iPod, and iPad as "iPhone" below.) As of this writing, there are three MIDI Mobilizer-compatible iOS apps: Line 6 MIDI Memo Recorder (Free), which records and plays back MIDI data in real time; Audiofile Engineering MIDI Surface ($5.99), a touchpad controller; and Garren Langford Midi Live ($39.99), a multitrack MIDI file player with real-time track control. I checked out the first two for this review (Ed. Note: scroll to the bottom of this article for video of the MIDI Memo Recorder and MIDI Surface apps in action); Line 6 says dozens of developers have requested its software development kit, so there should be more apps in the near future. From Phone to MIDI
The MIDI Mobilizer comes with two 64-inch cables and a quickstart guide. A collection of friendly tutorial videos on Line6.com should get you off to an even quicker start. Fig. 1: Arrow-shaped LEDs indicate incoming (left) and outgoing (right) MIDI data. The cables, manufactured by Planet Waves, feel solid. In fact, they weigh almost six times as much as the interface itself (2.9 oz vs. 0.5 oz). That mismatch, combined with the interface's protruding dock connector and plastic housing (see Fig. 1), made me worry I'd accidentally step on a cable and snap off the connector. The cable length also made it harder to tell which MIDI plug was In and which was Out. I ended up wrapping rubber bands around the ends of the MIDI Out cable to make it easy to identify. You may be wondering how Planet Waves managed to wire a five-pin MIDI plug to a three-connector phone plug. The secret is that MIDI actually uses only the three central pins on a standard MIDI cable, although all five pins plus the shield may be connected. Fig. 2: If you want to wire up your own MIDI Mobilizer cables, follow this schematic. The MIDI connector shown here is male. After missing the chance to record a beautiful MIDIfied baby grand piano because I hadn't felt like cramming the cables into my bag, I decided to trace the connections and solder up my own cables (see Fig. 2). I bought a 6-foot, stereo phone cable with 2.5mm plugs from Monoprice.com (an excellent source for cables); cut it in half; and soldered some RadioShack MIDI plugs to the wires to make a more portable harness. Note that 2.5mm is smaller than the standard 3.5mm iPod headphone jack; it's more commonly used for mobile phone headsets. Take a MIDI Memo
So what can you do with the MIDI Mobilizer? That depends on which app you run. The basic MIDI Memo Recorder turned out to be far more fun and useful than I'd expected. This app is like a tape recorder for MIDI. You tap the huge onscreen record button, play in some MIDI (anything from a riff you want to remember to a bulk data dump of synthesizer patches), and it's saved as a Standard MIDI File. You can then email the file to yourself for safekeeping, or connect the iPhone to a computer via Wi-Fi and transfer the file through the app's built-in Web server. Fig. 3: My 74-second MIDI keyboard performance was about 1/7000 the size of an equivalent audio file. My first test was with the ancient Yamaha DJX keyboard I keep up in my living room to distract my kids from my m