Many synths have a single USB2 port for audio and MIDI. Unlike USB3, USB2 is half-duplex and uplink and downlink data must be scheduled on the same link. I assume this leads to increased queuing/scheduling delay (and hence jitter) for MIDI. Has anyone looked into how MIDI jitter increases with the busyness of a USB2 bus? Should we try to connect our USB2 MIDI devices including synths to different buses, even when bandwidth is sufficient, to reduce MIDI jitter? What is best practice (ideally based on data)?
I have a high-spec audio setup with macOS running MainStage for live performance and certainly it feels subtly more responsive to play a piano-style sound directly on the HW synth generating the sound than via an external controller keyboard (with MIDI routed through MainStage). I assume this is due to MIDI jitter which I want to reduce....
Maybe I need to wait for timestamped MIDI 2.0 over full-duplex USB3?