Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

I recently purchased a Roland UM-1 USB Midi interface so I could get some
communications working with my PC for storing drum kits.  It's a cool little
interface, and fairly inexpensive ($49 at Edirol's site) if you want a USB
type.

Of course, the driver is crashing my Mac.  But, that's another story.

I threw the driver on a PC and started working immediately.  I pulled up a
MIDI file of some Piano and it played beautifully, except there was a
cackling coming from my amp, kind of a static or popping sound.  At first I
thought 'Boy, these are some bad GM sounds', but after then downloading some
kits from DTXpressions to play with, I hit the 'Send' key on DTXchange and
during the entire send, the popping was occuring, this time at a much faster
speed, but only for the two seconds or so required to receive the kit.  It
seems that any MIDI data received causes an audio glitch in the outputs.
The transmission worked properly, however.

Then, I noticed anytime MIDI was hooked up, there is a slight ticking from
my DTXpress brain in the neighborhood of 240-260bpm.  Disconnecting the
Roland UM-1 from the MIDI cable, effectively powering it down, stops the
ticking.  Shutting down the computer but leaving the cables connected also
stops the ticking.  When the windows driver is running, the ticking occurs.

Finally, I did a bulk dump of data from the DTXpress brain.  This I can't
get to work at all.  The PC doesn't simply doesn't seem to see any data.
During this, I get no popping or static through the amp however.

In frustration, I swapped the MIDI cables in and out in case I did something
wrong, which didn't do a thing, but when they were swapped, I was getting a
significant ground hum from my Amp that I wasn't before.

Any ideas on what's causing this?  I also can't seem to detect any of this
through my headphone jack, but based on the volume output on it, I can't say
for sure if it is there or not.

-Dan



-- 
Dan Mowczan, pinball@...