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

[david]

Nick Copeland wrote:
>   > 1980's-era idiocy of MIDI, in that it only has 127 steps in its CC's 
> (sheesh, not even a lousy byte!). Do you burn two controllers with 
> fine/coarse adjustments? If so, how do you determine the scale for fine 
> and/or coarse?
>  >
>  
> The choice to use 7 bit rather than 8 bit transmission in the original 
> spec was pragmatic. If 8 bit had been used it would have added more 
> than 10% of useless overhead to realtime messages (key on/off) and not 
> really have improved the efficiency of other controls - 127 steps are 
> too restrictive, but 256 would have been as well so double encoding 
> would still have been a requirement. At the time, this overhead was 
> quite a lot with a tranmission rate of just 31.25 Kb/s, and the use of 
> more complex encoding would have been an effort for the 8 bit processors 
> used in the early synths for which this was developed.

There was a lot less horsepower running around in those days. Especially 
since the one processor also had to exercise real-time control over the 
music hardware while sending, receiving and (I guess) passing through 
MIDI events. The standard MIDI port is basically just a serial port, so 
if 31.25Kb/s was the speed, that was pretty fast for those days.

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

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community