USB Hub

Hey there!

I bought a USB hub with 7 ports .
I need it so ican use USB port 1 on my mac book pro for my audio interface
and USB port 2 for the usb hub where i hook up my maschine and my remote sl 25.

i worked with this for three days and everything went fine but today it seems as if both midi devices aren´t recognized by the computer.

and i´m not sure if this is new or if it was always like this but the usb hub is getting pretty hot.

does anybody have an idea what i can do?

by the way the USB hub came without a sofware......

 

No software necessary for that, plug & play.
Is the usb hub powered? If not don't attach so many devices or try it one by one.
If its powered check transformator/ power lights.

I don't have a macbook pro but remember it has a powered usb port, good for devices that are not powered, and one port more for low consumptions devices like a thumbdrive or a printer that has its own power supply.

Only thing i can say is attach stuff to different ports with & without a hub to eliminate the problem.
Try another usb cable for the hub.
Did you change anything to your setup after those 3 days?

grtz res

 

know it works again !
i didn´t change anything, i dont know why it works know.

but i ´ll change the usb cable from the hub.
it really looks and feels cheaper than the other ones i have......

tabks anyway for a quick response

 

I've heard this happens with macbooks, some common tips I've read in the past are disabling airport, and all of the energy save options. If you do a search on Serato's Scratch Live Forum for "dropped audio" or "audio dropping" you'll find tons of info on this phenomenon.....I don't recall all the details but I know I had the problem with some other stuff and followed their advice and have been fine since

 

So many internal peripherals inside Mac Books and Mac Book Pros such as the iSight camera, Internal keyboard and Trackpad, WiFi etc are interfaced internally via USB - sharing the same USB root ports as the external devices you hook up.

Bit of a shame really ... Examine the More Info part on the System Information window for evidence of this. You'll also get to see how much current each device you have connected simultaneously consumes.

From memory the Maschine controller occupies 370mA of the possible current available from a powered USB port. Consider in most cases bus-powered portable hard drives consume almost all the current available from a USB root port.

The unfortunate part about the 7 port powered USB port you have connected is that the power delivered from the PSU doesn't provide 500mA of current per port - it's 500mA to be shared around all bus powered devices you connect to it.

It is this aspect of my Mac Book Pro which has made me give up on the idea of basing my whole studio around a laptop and instead I have a grunty PC Quad Core desktop which not only has several USB root ports (7 compared to the minimalist 2 ports on the Mac Book Pro) but also allows me to pop in PCI cards providing additional USB2 ports.

I *REALLY WISH* a company would make an industrial-grade multiport USB hub which caters for musicians needing to bus power several devices simultaneously on laptop systems having too few USB root hubs! 500mA per port with proper electrical isolation between each port please! Data activity indicators on each port would be great too. If I could buy a rack mountable USB hub which gives me 16 USB ports for around $500 it would be a great investment for the studio ... goodbye USB bus powering hassles!

Hang on a minute - this crew seem to be on to it!
http://www.sealevel.com/product_detail.asp?product_id=1283

 

jasefos:
thank you for the insightful info in regards to hubs and power its been a question i've hade for ages ( that even if your hub is powered is it really sufficent for all ports )

a question for you, have you found any application that measures how much a port is actually using?

*edit* also if you have found any other alternative vendors that offer the same solution sealevel does?

thank you

 

jasefos, Thanks for your technical information about the USB ports on the macbook laptops. I am fairly new to apple macbook pro world. I just got my laptop recently and I was having the same issues with using a 4-port usb hub to use my audio interface and midi keyboard. I was jamming on my Maschine and then all of a sudden the sound dropped off from my external soundcard..Now, I'm thinking of getting a firewire audio interface to avoid the usb port issue.

 

Or if your Mac has an Express Card slot, you could buy one of those Express Cards which give you additional USB ports. I have a generic one which I bought for around $80AUD from a Mac shop (yes I got ripped off) which gives an additional USB2.0 port (powered!) and 2 additional 1394 ports. I run my Maschine controller using this port.

Consider also if you're using USB2 external portable (2.5") bus powered hard drives that you could free up your available bus powering by buying a Firewire chassis instead (find one that gives you a 6 pin connection so it can bus power also). Time to make use of those relatively unused Firewire ports!
---

On a Mac you can find it from the More Info button in the System Information panel accessible from the Apple menu in the top left hand corner of Finder.

On a PC (WinXP) you can find it by pressing <Windows><Pause/Break> to access the System Properties panel. Head to the Hardware sub panel and click on the Device Manager button. Scroll the list down until you find the Universal Serial Bus Controllers icon (right at the bottom of the list) and expand that branch. For each USB Root Hub entry you can inspect its properties and heading to the Power sub-branch. Any devices connected to that USB root hub will be listed along with the power they each consume.

This info is handy for working out why devices may be dropping on and off the bus once you add multiple devices to a hub.

I'm waiting in the hope cheaper alternatives come about however it's not as critical in the studio where I run a desktop PC with multiple separate powered USB2 ports (supplied by the Motherboard and by an additional PCI card).

If anyone finds something that fits the bill which they've tried and tested I'm sure others on this thread including myself will be interested to know!

It would be excellent if there was a "made for musicians" rack mounting heavy duty USB2 hub with 16 or so root ports - that would be superb for those of us using multiple control surfaces!

 

As I know also the firewire-port is internal bound with the USB-Ports so this wouldn't work the way you want. Shure, you'll habe one free USB-Port but the data goes on the same way...

 

Hey Jkadauke,

Thanks for that bit of advice. Dang, I wish I knew this earlier lol. I guess I'm out of luck either way haha. At least I have 1 empty port now.

Instead of buying a new firewire card, I just bought a 800-400 Firewire cable and connected it to my Mackie D.2 firewire mixer. So far so good, I was wondering if I would lose any performance if I daisy chained my Maxtor firewire hard drive to this? I'm trying to squeeze as much speed as possible out of my 13" Unibody Macbook Pro, 2.26Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4G DDR3

~Petey X

 

first thanks again jasefos.. great info.

and here's a story of what can happen regarding using the wrong psu with your computer.

so i have a diy build desktop we use at the studio i was noticing that there were some with power my usb peripherals ( audio dj8, keyboard, trackball, maschine, xone 1d, and sometimes a additional external hd ) well i start noticing issues with everything not getting power.. little did i forget that my psu was totally underpowered ( running 450 watt and failing ) well, after countless conversations with technical support it made sense that my computer due to having psu issues is probably affecting everything incl. performance.. well not I've tried maschine on a additional computer and it refuses to power up aka its fried now..

point in case make sure if you are running a desktop to get a high quality psu and def make sure it is enough power for all your peripherals esp get for maschine..

or you will end up like me sending it back to NI..

thanks NI for helping sorting out what the cause of issue was..