eMagic Unitor8 and Windows XP

01 May 2012 - Nic Ho Chee

How big a MIDI chain is too big a MIDI chain? If after chaining a set of instruments together you can play a note, go away get a cup of tea, and come back to hear the note being played on the last instrument in the chain, it may be a tad long.

At this point you probably want to be able to send a signal to all of your instruments in parallel, and this is where the Unitor8 comes in... it's an 8in 8out MIDI box which supports SMPTE timecode and connects to a MAC or Windows PC via firewire or USB. The company that made the Unitor8, eMagic was absorbed into Apple and no longer supports the Unitor8 for Windows.

There are Windows 2000 drivers which will work for Windows XP, there doesn't however appear to be a route for Windows 7 installation as the drivers are unsigned and possibly not compatible. If you do have Windows XP you can do the following:

• Download the latest Windows 2.27 drivers from here.
• Unzip the file, there should be a directory containing the required Win2k drivers.
• Make sure that ALL of the previous versions of the driver have been removed from your C:\WINDOWS\inf directory. You have to do this by hand.
  • Remove all files with the wildcards EMGICUS*.inf and EMGICUS*.pnf. You can open the .inf files to make sure that they are the eMagic Unitor8 drivers. You should be able to see a device description containing the string "emagic Unitor8 USB - MIDI, SMPTE, VITC, LTC".
  • Remove the oem*.inf and oem*.pnf files created for the Unitor8. You need to be VERY careful with this, make sure that the only files you're removing are for the Unitor8, you can look in the .inf file and it should have the same string as in the previous list-item. In the test case oem88.inf and oem88.pnf were removed.
• Attach the Unitor8 through USB, and turn the device on. You should have the "Found New Hardware" wizard appear. Do not automatically search for drivers, instead add a search path to the Win2k directory contained in the zip file unidrv227.zip. It should find the correct driver for your "emagic MIDI device" and upon loading the driver you should see a dialog which complains that you have an unsigned non-WHQL compliant driver, continue through this and your drivers should install.

You should see the following in the Device Manager under Universal Serial Bus controllers: You should also now be able to select the Unitor channels in you MIDI enabled applications:

It should work as expected from now on, just don't upgrade to Windows7+ and you should be fine!