These used to be readily available in the late 80s early 90s, Most of the manufacturers who used to make them have stopped. Guess the demand is a lot lower now that everyone is hooking up their gear to pcs. But for midi controlled rigs they can be useful to allow you to down load, upload , modify patches on all your midi controlled gear without having to unplug cables left right and centre. I reckon a singke 19" rack unit or maybe even a half rack unit would be suitable for most peoples needs

I agree it's a useful thing to have, but as MIDI gear has increased in sophistication, they've become less and less necessary IMO... particularly in guitar rigs where you've mostly only got 3 or 4 devices chained in serial. I could certainly see the use of one of those in a keyboard rig though!

That said, a MIDI Thru box that isn't cheap plastic like the MIDI Solutions boxes would be a great addition to the product line. Maybe integrated into another rack device?

Switchblade. But if Ron can accomplish the same functionality at a lower price point, I'm all for it!

Switchblade's not a MIDI patch bay, it's (among other things) a MIDI-controlled patch bay...

My mistake, I misunderstood the OP.

Doing stuff like this is kind of tricky, just because there isn't as much of a market as you'd think (that's why lots of companies used to make them). We are trying to organize things here such that we can do specialized products like that and still turn a profit, because I like to solve problems that others won't tackle (or don't tackle well).

yeah I realise demand is probably low for this type of gear now.

Been looking around, there are some old units still available and so some degree something like the M audio midisport USB midi interface will do what I want, also found some wiring diags for a midi patch bay so may have a go at building one. This gives me the advantage of building it to suit my needs exactly.

Toying with a few addins like usb connectivity programable patch selection and one nice feature midi patch mapping