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

[thomas fisher]

On Friday 31 August 2007 23:52:33 david wrote:
> thomas fisher wrote:
> > On Friday 31 August 2007 01:09:07 david wrote:
> >> Steve McConville wrote:
> >>>> 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),
> >>
> >> That could be separated fairly easily, I'd think.
> >>
> >>> and has it's expansion room squeezed into
> >>> the SysEx ghetto.
> >>
> >> That's a big problem.
> >>
> >>> Midi over ethernet would be even less pleasant, and
> >>> less logical, than doing RS-232 over ethernet.
> >>
> >> Only reason I mentioned Ethernet is that there are analog musical
> >> instruments around already that can transmit their audio via Ethernet
> >> (instead of analog audio cables).
> >>
> >>> 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.
> >>
> >> I suspect that MIDI won't be budged. It is a standard in the music
> >> world, and I doubt that many musicians care about it's limitations. They
> >> may not even be aware of them. MIDI certainly keeps time in a lot finer
> >> increments than I'm able to play - that's why sequencer programs have
> >> quantization functions!
> >
> > How does the " XG " extension play into this? How proprietary is it?
>
> I don't know - and each week I play a Yahama PSR-740 keyboard with
> Yamaha's XG. I've recorded some MIDIs using it, and they open just fine
> in Rosegarden and play in fluidsynth. Or maybe you're talking about
> something else?

I do not know either, and was asking in the context of the MIDI discussion. I 
have always assumed that XG was an extension to the standard MIDI 
specification. And again I always assumed that an interpretative function 
existed somewhere in software layers either within a driver or in a filter. 
As with your Yamaha PSR-740 XG are all functions / prsets & ?? interpreted by 
the Linux MIDI? I am only guessing how all of this works.
Tom