[LAU] Running Status v.s "Ordinary" Status and MIDI merging

[Clemens Ladisch]

Justin Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Clemens Ladisch <cladisch at fastmail.net> wrote:
> > Please note that neither the USB MIDI protocol nor ALSA's sequencer
> > messages can use running status.
> 
> If I understand correctly, running status is not an alternative to the
> MIDI protocol,

It is a part of the MIDI protocol.

> it is an alternative way of interpreting the bytes (comparable to
> nrpn or such), so there should be no issue of MIDI or ALSA
> incompatibility.

Running status is a feature of the encoding used by MIDI.

USB MIDI and the ALSA sequencer use different encodings.

A USB MIDI adapter converts from MIDI to the USB MIDI protocol, and the
USB MIDI driver converts that data back to MIDI.  It is not possible to
detect from the result whether the original MIDI data used running
status.


Best regards,
Clemens