Use as an expander?

[custa1200]

Is it possible to use the 880 from the MRCC as an expander, i.e. from the 1 of the 4 MRCC USB midi to the 880 PC usb?

[oldgearguy]

Is it possible to use the 880 from the MRCC as an expander, i.e. from the 1 of the 4 MRCC USB midi to the 880 PC usb?

If I recall,  the MRCC USB ports are 4 inputs,  1 output.  So if you hook up a USB cable between the MRCC and 880, the 880 will only see/use 1 input,  but it does give you the ability to send that to 4 DIN MIDI ports. 

*I think* you might be able to use the 4 880 USB virtual outputs to send back to the 4 USB virtual inputs of the main MRCC.  So you could send 4 DIN MIDI 880 inputs to the USB outs.

All of this is way harder to think about read manuals about than to just plug stuff together and try it.   Unfortunately,  I'm traveling for a bit and only have the 880 with me and my wife refuses to walk into the studio to try and cable up tests.   Lol

[Darryl]

Yes, what OGG said… ^^^

We don’t normally recommend using the 880 as an expansion just because it’s confusing to have to route on 2 devices. It’s hard to keep track of what’s going where. It’s a lot easier to plug-in an MRCC XpandR 4x1 if that provides enough DINs for your use case.

[custa1200]

I mean ideally the 880 would have an ethernet port to join the two. It would just be a nicer form factor to have on the desktop rather than another MRCC

[Darryl]

I see. We considered that, but we wanted to keep the cost down, and at the time the chip shortage was happening and we had a limited selection of MCUs to choose from. We decided to keep it simple, but it's not a bad idea.
If one refrains from hitting the bong beforehand, it's not impossible to route 880 and MRCC ports back and forth over the MRCC USB host. Like OGG said, there's only one output from the MRCC USB host port, so 3 of the 880 outputs would only be routable from the 880 DIN inputs. Or, you can route the MRCC USB out to more of the 880 outputs taking into account not to overlap MIDI channels.

[custa1200]

Food for thought if you ever do a revision of the 880 form factor