Multiple USB devices - PITA

1

One of the biggest PITAs with USB audio is when devices begin multiplying as you plug them (sometimes by necessity) into different USB ports. At last night’s rehearsal the Jupiter-80 once again believed it had never been connected before and we now have three iterations of the JP-80 in the physical inputs list and also two iterations of a System-8. Each time we have to go into Options and tie these ‘new’ instruments to Cantabile’s ‘virtual’ ports. I ‘get’ this, and can sort it out, but for others of my kind it is utterly confusing.

Is there any way that Cantabile could sort this out automatically, or would it simply be unable to be sure that we didn’t have two Jupiter-80s?

2

Excellent Inquiry The_Elf, I too am curious as to if there is some new coding that could solve this. It gets everyone at some point. Anyway :+1:

Dave

3

It’s truly frustrating! Happens with all DAWs and Hosts to me!

Not ideal but Studio One has an excellent yet stupid feature: if it does not find an expected device, it has a popup with a simple Retry/Cancel question. You can try to plug into another usb port and keep hammering retry until something good happens (hopefully).

I just hope this is not the state of the art… :cold_face:

4

Unfortunately not. All Windows supplies is a list of MIDI device names - which physical devices those names map to is invisible to Cantabile.

Brad

5

Thanks, Brad. Yes, I suspected as such.

6

I just ran into this problem - I have 3 USB interfaces of the same brand/name. In Cantabile they show up as “Widi Bud”, “Widibud #2”, and “Widibud #2 #2”. I did find that I could change the name of the device in Windows 10 Device Manager by changing the Friendly Name in the registry for that device. What I can’t change is the “bus reported device description”. If Cantable could use the Friendly Name from the registry, that would help those of us with several devices of the same name.

How did I locate the Friendly Name? It’s in the Windows Registry.
While looking at the appropriate MIDI interface in Device Manager, I opened one of the 3 interfaces, went to the Driver Details tab, and then looked for Driver Key and copied the value. Then I search for that in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. There is the key for Friendly Name. When I change this, Device Manager updates with the new name. I hope Cantabile can access this ‘Friendly Name’, or it leads to a configurable option.

7

This is one of the major issues in Windows as far as I’m concerned.

8

Hi,

To manage this I use USBOblivion (with all devices disconnected) to remove all the different port enumerations

I also have all ports and cables labelled so I always plug a device into the same port.

2 Likes
9

Similarly, you can go into Windows Device Manager>View>Show Hidden Devices and delete the USB port instances you don’t want. If its a real mess, just delete them all and then plan on always plugging each specific device into a specific USB port, no exceptions, and it should remain clean.