LabView and USB MIDI cable

[Wowk]

Can LabView interact with a MIDI-capable piece of HW through a cheap 5 dollar USB MIDI cable? 

[RTSLVU]

I believe it can be done. How easy will depend on if VISA recognizes the MIDI port and what is "sees" is as.

If VISA and NI MAX sees is as a valid port (MIDI or Serial port) or USB instrument then you should be able to read and write to is just like any VISA compatible instrument.

If not then it probably wont work without jumping through a lot of hoops.

Only way to know for sure is to buy one and try.

What have you got to lose besides $5?

[Wowk]

Unfortunately, NI MAX doesn't seem to detect the cable.  I tried 2 different manufacturer's cables...

[Dennis_Knutson]

No. MIDI is neither USBTMC or RS232 so MAX will not detect it. Didn't you search for MIDI before posting your question? Please do that. You'll see several threads on the problems with MIDI and some possible solutions.

[jeds]

LabVIEW is able to communicate though midi, although  it's a very very hacky process!   I'm assuming your cable has drivers and  creates a midi interface

There's two ways to do it, this works if you are on windows and it's probably the cleanest way.

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/epd/p/id/718

which may be enough for some people...  The second, more full featured way of getting MIDI out of labview is through OSC...  get this

https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/osc

And use it to generate OSC messages, then  grab a complementary piece of software to do the OSC- MIDI translation, unfortunately the OSC to midi conversion department is pretty sad right now,  there's a lot of  hacky programs, like OSCulator, touchOSC bridge, this thing (http://konkreetlabs.com/2011/05/24/free-win-mac-osc-to-midi-converter/) that all can be persuaded into working, but it's not very pretty. perhaps the best alternative to  get MIDI to OSC is though a  synthesis software suite such as pureData, MAX/MSP, Max for Live... but I assume you don't want to learn a new programming  language (and don't want to spend hundreds of dollars in music software)

As a matter of fact, because labVIEW's native MIDI support is less than stellar,(or inexistent! :()   I'm working on third way, basically  creating a whole API to communicate to the OS provided midi interfaces, but you need to do some DLL/framework  (winMM, CoreMidi, ALSA) in addition to the labVIEW API  to get it working... It's actually not that sophisticated,  but  there's way to much work to be done before it's usable ( so far  you can  get a listing of MIDI devices and  information about them but no messaging just yet..)