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I have a USB MIDI controller that works in either of those but doesn't work in any of the USBs at the back, suggesting they are the "enhanced" ones.




Rethink.

MIDI connects do not need a large bandwidth data stream. Compared to audio data, MIDI is very miniscule.

Typically most motherboards are mfr'd with ONE USB 2 port and all the rest are USB 1.1 ports. Some few mobos may have more than one USB 2 port on them, they will be rare.

Unfortunately for us, the makers seem to not be able to clearly identify *which* of the USB ports is the USB 2 port. Often we can only find that one by trial and error -- with the Audio USB device.

This gets complicated by the fact that the typical USB 2 Audio device can indeed function in the USB 1.1 port -- but with less bandwidth, which often leads people to think that the connect is fine when they test it out using only one stereo input on a multiple input device, or find that they can stream multiple channels at a lower bandwidth, say 44.1KHz, but will soon find out that they need USB 2.0 in order to stream 96KHz or multiple channels of 44.1, etc.

If your MIDI devices are not working from the rear ports of your PC., there is likely another reason, possibly you are running XP and have crossed the "ten device limit" for USB installs and need to do the registry clean to install new ones, or perhaps the rear ports are suffering from a hardware fault, something of that sort is happening.

For the multiple channel sound device, I think that the PCI card is the way to go if at all possible. After all, the USB stuff actually ends up on the PCI bus anyway...


--Mac

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