If you hadn’t read the manual, you’d just go to your Bluetooth settings and look for the Jack there. When I say “straight-forward”, that doesn’t mean intuitive. I had some difficulty connecting the Jack to an older Mac, but it was straight-forward with a new M1 Macbook running Big Sur. In apps like GarageBand, you can access your wireless MIDI instrument in the Settings->Advanced menu, where the WIDI Jack should appear under the ‘devices’ list. If you’ve enabled Bluetooth on the iOS device, the Jack should show up in the app.
To connect an iPhone or iPad was just a tad more complicated. The Jack instantly found the WIDI Master connected to a drum module and I was off and playing in seconds, with no noticeable latency. These rechargeable devices have enough juice to keep the Jack running for hours – especially given the minuscule power draw of the tiny transmitter.Īs mentioned, I powered the WIDI Jack with a power bank and used the optional TRS-to-DIN-5 cable to connect the transmitter to a few devices, including the Zendrum which had eluded wireless operation with the processor products. There are a few options for powering the WIDI Jack and I opted for a mobile phone power bank. This means you can connect the Jack to almost anything – if you have the correct cable.īut more importantly for my needs, you can power it via the USB-C port. Where the Master can only connect to a five-pin MIDI jack, the Jack has two mini jacks which can link to TRS MIDI, DIN-6-mini MIDI and DIN-5 MIDI cables. This member of the WIDI stable uses the same technology, but offers more versatile connection options. And while that worked fine with most devices in our test arsenal, it failed to fire with a couple, including a Zendrum and Avatar sample pad. However, there is one potential “flaw” with the WIDI Master – it requires DC power from the MIDI connection. It advances the work done for the QuiccoSound mi.1 we reviewed a few years back, allowing almost limitless MIDI connectivity – instrument to computer, instrument to iOS device and even instrument-to-instrument connections are possible.Ī typical use might be connecting a drum module to your laptop to trigger a VST or given the trapKAT’s new programming for the KAT-branded 2box module, connecting the trigger device to the brain wirelessly. The WIDI is powered by the host device and has a tiny separate receiver unit that plugs into the MIDI In jack of the host. The WIDI Master is a tiny transmitter that plugs into the five-pin MIDI jack on any instrument or audio device. We used it to output MIDI from a range of modules and found it to be almost universally effective. When we reviewed the original WIDI Master in November 2020, we tested the “virtual MIDI cable” in various configurations – using different modules to output MIDI to a MacBook Pro running VSTs and to GarageBand on an iPad.
CME, which released the ultra-compact WIDI in 2020, has followed up with more wireless Bluetooth solutions.
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