[LAU] Concurrent Patch Management, and process control

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday, February 14, 2015 07:54:06 PM Jonathan E. Brickman wrote:
> "Robust Session Management" has now been replaced with something much
> better:
> 
> http://lsn.ponderworthy.com/doku.php/concurrent_patch_management
> 
> All patches are now kept running all the time, are switched by MIDI
> channel from the MIDI controller, and can be played simultaneously.
> 
> Process control, for reliable and controlled startup of all of those
> patch elements, is done by a peculiar own-grown Python library; if
> anyone has a better way, please do let me know :-)

Although I am not much of a musician, and have only played with midi on a 
much older machine, I have to say that this is the first truly new 
approach to the patch switching problem to come down the pike since I gave 
midi up quite some time ago.  Very creative in my old broadcast engineers 
technical view.

Technically, midi has not kept pace with the ability of the hardware on at 
least 2 fronts.  First being the interface speed of 31,250 baud.  Today 
with 16550's and  or even newer stuff and decent optos in the isolation, 
this could very easily be pushed up to 315 kilobaud without straining any 
of the signal handling hardware.

Second is the 16 channel limit by only using a nibble wide address, 
enforced by the 8 bit interchange word format.  With a 16 bit data packet, 
this could be extended to 512 or more "channels" while still being much 
faster and more in time from voice to voice.

With both fixes in place, you would still be feeding note data 5x faster 
than now, achieving a much more synchronized and noticably crisper sound.

In Floyd Cramers day, I rather liked his rolling note style of playing the 
piano, but applied to the whole gamut of a multivoice synth, it soon gets 
annoying because the effect at 31250 baud is not as obvious as Floyd's 
style, instead it just annoyingly smears the sound.

We seriously need a MIDI-2 standard that addresses this.  A pure glass 
fiber jumper cable could easily do the 16 byte command word, and do it 
with megaword/second speeds, in addition to being the perfect on stage 
humm isolator that plagues the analog copper cabling (that can give you a 
lethal shock if not wired correctly) way too often.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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