6 Oct
2009
6 Oct
'09
7:20 p.m.
The process for the sysex manufacturer ID registration
is not only expensive
($200 per year) but also quite ridiculous. It is almost an invitation to
sysexquatting. Have you seen the "Recently Assigned Manufacturer ID Numbers"
page? http://www.midi.org/techspecs/manid.php
There are a lot of companies with a status of suspended, relinquished, renewal
pending ... In red, no less, to add embarrassment to the crisis?
There's no ID for e.g. Sequential Circuits (resp. I didn't take a look
at the complete list), a company that doesn't exist any more, but there
are still some synth used a lot, not only the old once without MIDI, but
also the later devices from the 80ies, shipped with MIDI by default. I
don't know Sequential's ID, but it would be bad, if e.g. a relative
young company like Waldorf should get Sequential's ID (by the way
Waldorf also isn't in the incomplete list).
We should "create" some kind of FLOSS agreement, e.g. let's chose some
unused ID's or some "bizarre" IDs, I guess some companies might be
uninteresting for music as a first ID and then e.g. create a list on
linuxaudio.org to register a second and third ID for FLOSS.
0xXY (MMA numbers used by us)
0xVW (linuxaudio.org registered number LO)
0xTU (linuxaudio.org registered number HI)