“I have a question about what I suppose is vintage gear at this point, but maybe you can help me. I have a MOTU MTPAV MIDI interface and an old MTPII. I’ve been told they can be networked together using OMS, but have been unsuccessful so far. Can you help?”
This issue still comes up quite a bit so I suspect there are a lot of people using a setup similar to yours. They can be networked using either FreeMIDI or OMS to give you a total of 256 MIDI channels on 16 discrete cables. With OMS the process is slightly less intuitive, but courtesy of the Sweetwater Technical Support staff we’ll explain it for all those inquisitive minds.
Setup:
MTPAV is the first unit with the MTP II networked.
Both MTPAV and MTP set to Fast communication speed.
MTPAV set to “This box ID 1–8, Net Port =MTP”. This is the exact text from the MTPAV LCD display.
The MTP II is set to 1-8 on its select switch.
Results:
OMS will not find the networked MTP. But, if you select Add Device from your OMS setup software and give it one of the ports 9-16, then the networked MPT it works great. Both units work as expected in this configuration.
What happens is most people give up when OMS does not find the networked port. Most don’t know you can add a port beyond 8 and the MTP driver will work. However the MTP will not work if it is set to 9-16 which may also be a factor in your problem.
To recap: Both units set to fast. The MTP set to 1-8, not 9-16. OMS will not find the MTP, but by using the Add Device trick it will work.
A little known fact about the MTP OMS driver: It never ever shows networked interfaces as two icons. It always shows one icon to which you can attach devices on ports 1-17 (17 being a networked standard interface). The OMS drivers for Opcode interfaces show each interface.
