Hi folks
The background is...
I've got an older Mac with Cubase, and a newer Mac with Reaper, and a few old hardware synth units.
I'm in the process of importing some of my old Cubase songs & ideas onto Reaper, so as to phase out using Cubase.
What would be ideal is if both computers could be plugged into the same set of synth units, and I could easily alternate which computer I'm working from. This would greatly assist being able to do A/B comparisons of the old & new versions of the songs, to make sure that the new version actually is sounding the same.
One way I could create this setup is with a switch box such as this:
https://mindburner-midi-products.my-..._18705228.aspx
with the computers on A & B, and a synth unit on C.
The only down side of that, as far as I can see, is that every time I switched playback between the old & new songs, I'd have to manually switch the switch. I'm already doing this when I go between computers because they're sharing a monitor and keyboard. This would bring it up to 3 manual switches - one for the monitor & keyboard, plus two MIDI outputs coming from each Mac. If possible, I'd rather not have to switch 3 switches every time I want to go back & forth between song instances.
Another possibility is, I think I remember seeing that there are also signal-manipulation boxes which can merge two MIDI signals, i.e. take the input from both computers and pass both on to the synth box. But i.i.u.c. those would tend to cost more, because they're more electronically complex. And also they need a power supply - more cables, more elements to potentially go wrong.
Then I got curious.
If I never have both computers simultaneously playing back, do I really need to have the two signals explicitly switched or merged at all? Is it possible to have a passive joiner-box which simply passes on all MIDI signals from both computers? and then it's up to me to ensure _not_ to confusingly send a signal from both at the same time?
This is where my MIDI knowledge runs out!
I'm not sure whether, when it's not playing back, each computer is also sending intermittent pings in the meantime, like saying "hello I'm still here" to the synth unit. If that does happen, then the intentional MIDI note (from the computer which was in the middle of playing back a song) might accidentally arrive at the same time as a "ping" from the "dormant" computer, and the playback might get confused.
That in itself seems like a yes/no question, though my search skills haven't yet presented the answer :-)
As a follow-on to that... if a passive joiner-box _would_ do the job, what would that likely be called, so I can search for it?
Also open to advice about alternative solutions.
Thanks in advance!