Upgrade your Studio with THIS gear: How to connect ALL your MIDI gear with the MioXL

Staying in the flow, and staying focused on the music is essential while in the studio. You shouldn’t have to stop your idea to connect your MIDI controller to your DAW. In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at how to connect ALL your MIDI gear to your DAW with the MioXL. This way you have access to everything at all times, and have the flexibility to stay “in the moment”.

MIDI Workhorse

The secret to this grand promise of being able to stay in the flow in the studio is the MioXL. Whether your MIDI controller has 5-pin MIDI or USB connectivity, it can be connected to the MioXL. And with 8 5-pin MIDI in ports, 12 5-pin MIDI out ports, 10 USB Host port connections, and 22 RTP MIDI connections, you’re not going to run out of options to connect your controllers.

First Things First

Make sure, you’ve already downloaded Auracle for X-Series the free control software from iConnectivity before we get started.

Next, I’ve powered my MioXL with the included power supply, and connected it to my computer using a USB cable.

I’ve also checked if there is a firmware update available for my interface. There isn’t in this case but if I needed to update my firmware, I could click the “Firmware” tab in Auracle for X-Series and click “Load latest from web” to automatically update to the newest firmware.

Connecting 5-Pin MIDI gear

Let’s connect a 5-pin MIDI controller to our interface. I’m going to connect a synthesizer to the DIN 7 input on my mioXL with a 5-pin MIDI cable. I want to send MIDI FROM my synth, so I’m going to make sure the cable comes from the MIDI OUT of my synthesizer to the MIDI IN of my MioXL.

If I wanted to start using this input in my DAW immediately I can, without doing anything in Auracle for X-series. For example, if I open Ableton Live’s MIDI preferences, I can enable “Track” or “Remote” if I want to use this MIDI controller in Ableton Live.

While your DAW will have different options and settings than Ableton Live, the same general principle applies, look for your MIDI controller to show up in your DAW in whatever DIN port you connected it to.

Following through with my example in Ableton, I can now create a MIDI track and choose DIN 7 as my input to send MIDI to that track in Ableton Live.

What’s great about this process, is zero configuration is needed to get up and running. Connect your 5-pin MIDI controller to your interface, open your DAW and go!

Connecting your USB-MIDI controller to your interface

As mentioned already, I can connect up to 10 USB MIDI controllers to the MioXL. With 10 phsyical ports on the interface, this is super easy. You’ll find 4 ports on the front and 6 ports on the back. (BONUS: you could also connect a powered USB hub to any of the USB ports on your device and connect multiple devices to that hub, instead of connecting them physically to the interface.)

For this example, i’m going to connect two USB MIDI Controllers to USB ports on the front of the interface.

At this point, you may be wondering which USB port I connected these to? Will it show up in USB port 1 or 2? That’s where creating a USB Host Port Reservation comes into play. It allows us to define, what MIDI controller shows up for our 10 USB Host Ports. Here’s how…

USB Host Port Reservation

Click the “USB Host Reservation” tab in Auracle for X-Series.

You’ll see both of our MIDI controllers showing up in Auracle for X-Series, but nothing is selected in the Port Reservation section. This is because I haven’t defined where I want each MIDI controller to show up in my DAW.

To reserve a USB Host port, click the dropdown next to the Port your want to link, and choose your MIDI controller. In this example, I’m going to keep these MIDI controllers in the same order as they’re showing up.

With our Host Port Reservations made, we can head back to our DAW. Again, in my case I’m using Ableton Live. I’m going to choose Host Port 2 and that will be MIDI from the MIDI Controller I reserved for Host Port 2. Once your Host Port Reservation is made it will stay with that MIDI controller, so that your mappings are consistent.

Unleashing the Power of your MIDI Controllers to the MioXL

With this setup, we’re able to easily get MIDI into our DAW. But, we can also very easily send MIDI between our devices connected to our MioXM. To do this, let’s click the “MIDI Routing” tab in Auracle for X-Series.

Let’s say I want to send MIDI from my controller connected to USB Host Port 2 to my controller connected to DIN 7. Here’s how…

First, I should mention, I’ve connected a 5-pin MIDI cable from the DIN 7 output to the MIDI IN on my controller. For the most flexible setup in the studio, I’d suggest keeping the MIDI IN and OUT of your controllers connected to the interface at all times.

I’m going to click Host 2 under USB Hosted Device/Instrument under the Source or Input side. This is choosing my MIDI controller that I connected to USB Host Port 2.

To send this to the DIN 7 output, I’m going to choose DIN 7 under the DIN menu as a Destination (or ouptut). This will send MIDI from the MIDI controller connected to Host 2 to the MIDI controller connected to the DIN 7 MIDI output.

The power of this system, is I can now route MIDI from any device connected to my interface, to any other device with the click of a mouse. This allows you to create any possible Synth-Dream scenario in your studio, and most importantly stay in the flow and in the music!