17 Feb
2015
17 Feb
'15
11:09 a.m.
On Tue, 17 Feb 2015 10:25:23 +0100, Raphaël Mouneyres
wrote:
Don't get me wrong I do agree that MIDI is very useful today too. In fact I play in a
band where the whole setup has automation for changing effect and even electronic-drums,
and this is all MIDI, and ultra-reliable on stage with a mix of standard plugs and
midi-over-usb.
I pointed out he's right about a modern "plug-and-play" attitude for
networked discovery of services, and we all know this is not what MIDI is about.
It is often said that MIDI is dead, but as someone said earlier, most synth and
controllers if not all come with MIDI onboard, and I find it very comforting as it
guarantee a compatibility with older pieces of hardware, and it won't stop until any
other kind of new protocol has proven to do better.
I had thought about writing a Copperlan client for Jack, this would offer a bridge between
the Copperlan devices on the network, and MIDI devices available on Jack server... but
finally dropped the idea.
Raphaël
You're right here.
Len isn't just right with this. Len also explained why old faithful
MIDI, even with it's drawbacks, is a very useful thing.
I'm a MIDI guy from the beginning and I disliked MIDI much, but nowadays
we seldom suffer from MIDI issues, usually we suffer from odd MIDI
implementations. The most annoying issue IMO is that we don't get hard
real-time nowadays. There's a big difference between computers from the
80s and 90s, providing hard real-time and the crap we get today. It
always was possible to use more than just one MIDI interface. The first
computers, such as the C64 suffered from bad resolution, but later
computers, such as the Atari ST didn't suffer from this issue. The baud
rate and other limitations are an issue, but the real big issue
nowadays is the design of the hardware and software. Fortunately we are
still free to use more than just a single MIDI interface, we still
could use separated MIDI interfaces for each channel. SysEx data isn't
real time data, but it can be treated as real-time data, assumed we use
several MIDI interfaces and the rest of the hardware should be ok and
the software should be ok too. For example, there's no need to send
checksums with SysEx. SysEx "commands" often cause less traffic than
Pitch Bend or After Touch does.
When using MIDI, the KISS principle is the most important approach, but
unfortunately it seems to be out of style.