Tiny USB MIDI Adaptor

wozlaser March 2, 2025 Uncategorized 0

Gameboy game case becomes the USB MIDI Adaptor of the future.

I don’t know about you, but all my MIDI stuff has 1/8″ (3.5mm) TRS jacks. If something doesn’t, I’d rather use an adaptor for the old DIN stuff, not have that be the default. All the small stuff for travel has the small TRS MIDI jack, but where can I find a small way to get the MIDI in and out of the computer? It’s hard to find a USB MIDI adaptor that even has USB-C, let alone a small one with TRS MIDI jacks.

This is the solution, and it’s easy for you to do too. It’s just the cheapest USB MIDI adaptor you can buy, cut up and given new ins and outs.

IMPORTANT: you have to use the right USB-C jack, or you’ll have a bad day. I explain this in the previous article, but in a nutshell, if you use the wrong jack, this will only work with a USB-C to USB-A cable, and not C to C, without another adaptor, which is lame. The right jacks are the ‘upstream’ ones with two resistors on them, which tell USB-C devices this is USB2.

I actually made this with the wrong USB jack at first, and then swapped it out later.

You may have noticed there’s 4 MIDI TRS jacks. That’s because there’s actually 2 different ways to wire these. Before the TRS MIDI jack was formalized by the MIDI Association in 2018, manufacturers were already using this jack for MIDI, which led to two versions, A and B. A is the one that eventually became the standard, but a couple of things of mine, like the 1010 Black Box, are forever B. And why carry more adaptors when this adaptor has the space to be even more adaptory?

This is the cheap USB MIDI adaptor that I tore up to get the guts for this.