At the 2016 NAMM Show, Yamaha introduced a couple of new adapters that are designed to let you connect your MIDI gear wirelessly via Bluetooth to devices up to 10 meters away.
Yamaha’s Nate Tschetter gave us a quick overview at the Winter NAMM Show.
- The UD-BT01 adapter lets you connect devices with a USB TO HOST terminal to iOS devices and Mac.
- The MD-BT01 adapter lets you connect instruments with MIDI IN/OUT terminals to iOS devices and Macs
The adapters let you wirelessly connect your iOS devices (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch) or Mac to your instrument with Bluetooth and avoid having to reconnect every time you play.
The adapters each have a street price of about US $50.
can it send aftertouch???
Looks promising, what about the latency?
windows support? for bt midi…. ever.? I don’t want a mac.
i’m curious how the latency is in parallel, meaning multiple bluetooth devices at once sending midi in and out of one computer, because sometimes when using a lot of ports with regular midi there is a delay as it goes down the line of ports. if bluetooth had more delay overall, but messages were more in sync that would be useful in some situations.
Can we use it live to play a distant synth rack from a controller ?
I was trying to work out whether this would be of any use for my studio.
Each keyboard / synth module has 2 stereo cables, 1 power supply cable, and 1 or 2 MIDI cables (may be USB or DIN).
Overall Bluetooth MIDI would replace less than half the cables + give me headaches with battery charging.
So I think these new Bluetooth MIDI adapters are more useful in very simple rigs or if you want to be able to move around on stage, untethered.
And it’s a real shame they didn’t include audio too – but then the latency would be bad. The Akai EWI 5000 does this with 0 noticeable latency but I assume it’s not bluetooth.
The MIDI one needs no batteries…
Can it power stuff that is USB powered ?
if that’s not the case, these thing would be completely useless, to me at least.
See, I want something like that where you get two traditional ins and outs that send and receive to two other traditional ins and outs. These wireless midi things all involve computers and phones, while 30 years worth of tech still has to use a wire.
This would also bypass the whole Mac/PC issue
Hi guys ! Just wanted to let you know that i received my UD-BT01 today (the usb one)…
It works very good, with no perceptible latency (in logic pro, and on a 2011 mac book pro, which doesn’t support bluetooth LE 4.0, but with a bluetooth dongle)… and wait there more ! It works with a USB battery (a portable phone charger)… so my EWI usb wind controller now goes fully wireless…
(i just need to find a 1-inch usb cable, and hide this whole stuff so it all looks good… )
It work very good on iPhone too in garage band.
cheers !! Gildas
By the way : in the midi/audio studio, the mac recognize each bluetooth instrument individually, by their name and unique ID, so you can have multiple ones (i have this and a Roli Rise) and can route them the way you want like other midi or usb instruments, in theLogic environment…