CME WIDI Uhost

I love wireless MIDI. This device makes many MIDI devices wireless. I would have loved it to be self powering (by the MIDI bus) but that doesnt seem possible. Overall, it is a great way to make a USB device MIDI wireless, it works as expected: you connect the device you would like to use as a wireless MIDI device to the dongle, supply the dongle with 5v and you connect the MIDI device to a computer/tablet/telephone and use it as a wireless MIDI device. On Iphone you do need to connect to the CME WIDI host everytime you would like to use it as a MIDI input, unlike other wireless MIDI devices such as a the KORG microkey MIDI air keyboard range, which 'remind' the keyboard.

I wanted to connect my Yamaha YDP-163B digital piano to Pianoteq, but had to go through a floor to make it work. Bluetooth MIDI to the rescue, I thought, and found the CME WIDI devices and bought an Uhost and Bud Pro, plus the USB-B OTG Cable Pack I.

The setup is easy, and overall it works as expected. The Uhost pairs automatically with the Bud Pro. It also pairs fine with my Linux computer, and I get Bluetooth-MIDI that way too.

Latency wise, I carefully measured this programmatically and found that the latency between the Uhost and Bud Pro is 7 ms, with a range of 3 to 11 ms. In other words the "3 ms" advertisement figure is the minimum and there will always be some jitter.

I also measured between the Uhost and my computer which has Bluetooth 5.2. The results are pretty much the same there: 6-8 ms on average, and the same jitter.

There is no way around these latency figures with Bluetooth versions before 6.2 because the minimum "connection interval" is 7.5 ms in the spec. Without any other factors, the average latency should have been half of that, so around 3.75 ms. But there is clearly some inherent latency in the Bluetooth processing that pushes the average up by around 4-5 milliseconds.

The newly released Bluetooth 6.2 spec allows reduction of this interval, so even lower latency will have to wait for that spec to make it into devices.

Ein tolles und bahnbrechendes Produkt, was Midi-Umgebungen betrifft.
Einziges Manko war für mich, dass es nicht mit USB-hub-artigen Geräten funktioniert, also immer nur ein Gerät gleichzeitig anschliessbar… . Leider hat es auch nicht mit meinem Instrument1 funktioniert, daher geht es leider zurück. Probehalber anschliessen von diversen kabelgebundenen Controllern funktionierte ausgezeichnet (LPD8, KBoard, alte Midi-keyboards), also trotz allem: meine dringende Empfehlung an Interessierte zur Einbindung kabelgebundener Midigeräte in ein kabelloses Sytem!