Re: [LAU] An atrocity committed with PD (MIDI Spec) - Linux-audio-user

31 Aug 2007

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!

-- 
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community