[LAU] An atrocity committed with PD (MIDI Spec)

[Steve McConville]

> I am curious - has there been any move to modernize the MIDI
> connectivity standards to include USB or Ethernet?

There has been - there is a midi over usb standard.

Midi is a poor starting point for modernisation not just beacause of
the pragmatic compromises mentioned above but also because it is
wholly unlayered (the spec covers everything from the physical up to
the presentational layer), and has it's expansion room squeezed into
the SysEx ghetto. Midi over ethernet would be even less pleasant, and
less logical, than doing RS-232 over ethernet.

OSC has fixed these problems and should have been built into
everything since the mid-90s but so many people have invested time in
learning MIDI that they wouldn't countenance working with anything
else. It looks like RESTful web services may eventually replace both,
however.

-- 
steev
http://www.daikaiju.org.uk/~steve/