[LAD] JACK & MIDI

Pieter Palmers pieterp at joow.be
Fri Jan 18 13:38:43 UTC 2008


Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 11:13:10PM +0100, Julien Claassen wrote:
> 
>>   Why can't those people who discussed it here (Dave R., Fons and probably 
>> more - simply sit down and try to take as much as possible from the API - as 
>> it is - and try to work this new concept around it.
> 
> Well, the two you mention have a long history of not having radically
> different views... :-)
> 
> 
> Seriously, there are three things that I profoundly dislike in MIDI.
> 
> 1. The limited precision of almost all values, 7 bits or 14 with a
>    kludge (but even this kludge is not available in any standard
>    way for e.g. individual note frequencies). 
> 
> 2. Note events are identified by their frequency.
> 
> 3. The only thing that can actually refer back to a note on event
>    is it's corresponding 'note off' message. It's not possible to
>    send a controller value that refers to a previous note-on event.
> 
> 
> The worst result of all this, and what really drives me nuts is that
> the same limits get built-in, carved in stone, into each and every
> piece of sequencing software. They all perpetuate what is in fact
> a form of cultural poverty "there's not quarter tones in pop music,
> so they don't exist" while technically there is no more reason to
> do so. 
> 
> Midi-over-jack has missed the chance to fix 1) which would have
> been relatively easy. And even 2) and 3) are not so difficult to
> get rid of.

If someone comes up with a decent 'event protocol' I'm volunteer to 
implement it in jack, alongside the current jack-midi API (as an 
experimental feature). From an implementations perspective it's a 
no-brainer.

But can someone please tell me what to implement. And not in a vague 
way. IMHO that's the real issue, and the 3 points you now mention are 
only the first steps along that path. Please don't stop there. Take the 
time to write a funded proposal that can be discussed, and then implemented.

Greets,

Pieter



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