All About MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE)

[WasteLand]

Joué has stopped...

but cosmic balance:

Intuitive Instruments Exquis

https://dualo.com/en/exquis/

[jules99]

If the slow rollout of MPE in terms of DAW support and software instruments is any indication, we're miles away from MIDI 2.0

[Tj Shredder]

The first MPE instruments arrived before it was adopted to the Midi Standard. Midi 2.0 standard was declared before the first hardware supported it. I would imagine the adoption would be faster than MPE.
I am awaiting my first Midi 2.0 controller shortly. An Erae Touch 2…

[jules99]

Now you just need a DAW (if you don't have Logic or ProTools) and, more importantly, software instruments that make use of it.

[tapper mike]

Many DAW's (Bitwig, Ableton Live, Cubase, etc etc) support MPE natively and MPE doesn't require MIDI2.0

What's more if you can send more than one midi signal to a midi track you can still use a supported mpe virtual instrument. Finally there are chainers that have been on the market for years as a plugin that goes before virtual instrument which can distribute single midi channels to instances of a non mpe virtual instrument.

I was there before the advent of midi. Some hardware manufacturers would have pre midi communication methods that weren't compatible across brands or even hardware that they were producing at the time. Roland comes to mind and the work of Howard Jones.

Though midi was on the market it wasn't highly adapted for a few years. Magazines like Keyboard player downplayed the importance of midi and called fault with it due to clock sync issues when daisy chaining multiple midi devices which was a thing. Granted if someone had the foresight to develop a midi patch bay all would have been resolved rather quickly. Eventually all hardware manufactuers adopted midi or were put out of business. I remember looking at some fairly high priced synths which I had seriously considered purchasing and the deal breaker was no midi.


I've been involved to a greater or lesser degree with computer technology since the 1970's Compatibility was always an issue be it hardware or software or OS. I can't begin to tell the horror stories of data entry work looking at one screen from one computer and manually typing its contents into another day in day out. It was always the last thing to do at the end of the night after managing a restaurant. And then there was the printer is broke go get a new one. The ports don't match maybe we can find a coupler for competing scsi ports with different pin values. Sometimes we'd just have to buy a new computer and new printer and start all over again. It wasn't just software updates. A lot of that changed in the 90's when companies universally switched over to MS DOS OS and later Windows. Peripherals still had a long way to go. I would constantly scream. Why can't this be like MIDI! One port that never changes and is compatible with practically all synth/rompler hardware devices regardless of manufacturers.

Today we have mpe and midi 2.0 MPE really can work against some plugins especially those which use multiple overlapping samples like.. Dune and Vengence. No problem you can still use your mpe device in a non mpe mode. I do this all day every day when I feel that I don't need the features of mpe on a particular virtual instrument.

This may seem like tragic news to some. AOL is shutting down it's dial-up service. Midi 1.0 has been around a lot longer and will be around for years to come. MPE and Midi 2.0 are also with us permanently. Those that don't want the advantages of MPE or in situations where MPE may not be the best situation for plugins don't have to use it. Those software companies that fail to support mpe or midi 2.0 may go the way that all those non midi synth hardware companies did so long ago.



As for Joule products no longer being sold. I think they were a great introduction to mpe though the uniqueness and the limitation of the design led to it's ultimate downfall. MPE players are for the most part serious folk who want to play serious music on serious devices not toy looking ones.