Is MIDI obsolete?

[omissis]

Wel, guys, MIDI is the most used control protocol so far , but please compare MIDI's 8bit precision with OSC's 32bit , then tell me if MIDI is not obsolete...
M

[ClifAnd2k]

Jazz Mutant's Lemur is an example of hardware supporting OSC. It is distributed by cycling74, same company that distributes MAX/MSP. I think MIDI is so entrenched it will be around for a long time. But it is easy to run into its limitations, e.g., regarding precision and the low number of note-by-note dynamic controllers. I would like to see a MIDI II that was compatible with MIDI, but allowed additional controllers.

[Meffy]

There's always resistance to switching from tried and true ways. When automobiles were new, those who thought they were a "flash in the pan" used to shout:


(In retrospect, maybe we ought to have done. But then it's easy to forget that huge numbers of horses cause heaps [literally] of pollution too.)

[vurt]

ah but pollution that can be used to help the growth of plants and not the suffocation of


anyway,even if companies stopped producing midi equipment tomorrow with the amount of "classic" synths that people use and will contnue to use do you really think midi would die off so quick?
i agree it may not be the main language we use for musical communique in the near future but i doubt very much if you or i will ever see the "end" of midi

[Meffy]

The problem with horses in cities was that it cost a LOT to remove all that manure from the streets, and it caused massive health and sanitation problems.

I don't want to see the end of MIDI. Remember, kiddies, I'm the skunk who collects, repairs, and restores slide rules and century-old calculating machinery and such! :-D To me, obsolete means antiquated, superceded, but not necessarily entirely useless.

What I do want to see is widespread adoption and acceptance of a superior standard -- maybe OSC, maybe something else -- that addresses and corrects many of the deficiencies that have been sources of serious and legitimate complaints since before the MIDI standard even hit the streets in commercial products.

[vurt]

and im not saying there isnt better im just saying the fact there is better round the corner doesnt neccassarily mean the end of the former

and yes meffy the manure may have cost a lot to move but looking back over the years of not only pollution but accidents and such caused by cars and over usage of fuels i think the cost was much cheaper in human terms

<-isnt a big fan of cars and combustion in general(cept the combustion of effigys )

[Meffy]

I'd rather ride a horse than drive a car any day. Long as my trip was short. (Don't have a horse; can't afford one any more.) :-( But they're not unalloyed goodness -- accidents and problems were rife even in the Good Olde Dayes. Try scaling those problems to the immense population levels we have now and you'll see horses couldn't make it nowadays... much as I love them big dumb critters, they're not the answer.

Petroleum consumption is the big reason I dislike over-reliance on motor vehicles. Hybrid and electric vehicles will help some, but not much. Hydrogen? Not an energy source, but a storage and transfer medium. You still have to burn fossil fuels or split uranium atoms to get the energy to make most hydrogen.

Oxygen, on the other paw, is great stuff. I personally use an Evolution instead, but they're both dandy little MIDI keyboards.

[NAD]

MIDI is most definately out of date, it's a protocol developed at a time when communication speeds were lower, hardware was more expensive, processors were slower, and people just wanted to control several synths from one keyboard.

We do a lot more with it now, but it would make life a lot nicer if we had a new standard protocol which incorporated the things people do today in music, rather than abusing MIDI.

For example 128 step controllers are really a shame.

Drums messages should be able to include where the drum is hit as well as how hard

Guitar controllers should give position of the pick.

There should be mixer channel level and EQ messages, rather than using controllers which are mapped arbitrarily.

Yes.

I would like to see a MIDI II that was compatible with MIDI, but allowed additional controllers.

Precisely.

What I do want to see is widespread adoption and acceptance of a superior standard -- maybe OSC, maybe something else -- that addresses and corrects many of the deficiencies that have been sources of serious and legitimate complaints since before the MIDI standard even hit the streets in commercial products.

Thank you.

[deleted]

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[lalo]

MIDI is good....for some thing...
OSC is better in time critical and hi resolution stuff..

OSC is the future....but i think MIDI and OSC will live together

i'll buy this sooner or later

http://www.glui.de/prod/gluion.html

[Meffy]

MIDI is perfectly capable of what the user base requires.

Examples given earlier in this thread strongly indicate otherwise.

[deleted]

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[NAD]

OK, here's the deal:
I WANNA DO SLIDES LIKE IN FRUITYLOOPS! Fuckin' damnit! Why can't somebody just develop a new interface that will allow me to DO SLIDES LIKE IN FRUITYLOOPS?! Yeesh...

[Meffy]

Jonny, I think it's the manufacturers rather than the users who are keeping MIDI as the only widely supported standard. And they're doing it largely because they refuse to get along and work together.

It's one thing to "get along okay" but imagine if our computers were still stuck in the 1980s, as MIDI is -- would you really want to be using a Commodore 64 with 300-baud modem? :-) If that were all we had, it might seem like it was "good enough" but if there were a modern alternative... well.

Hybrid cars, while not perfect, are becoming more popular each year. I hope they'll bridge the transition to truly efficient, less polluting, less costly transportation. In the meanwhile I ride my bicycle whenever possible.

Burn granola, not oil! Right on!

[olja]

I think the MIDI protocol could live on for a while. What really bugs me is the issues I get all the time when trying to install a new MIDI controller.

Sure it would be great with a new standard with more flexibility but that will probably take a while.
So, in the meantime, what I'd really like to see NOW is another way of transferring MIDI.. Since almost all new MIDI controllers use USB these days and almost all of them have drivers that cause lots of problems..

I bought a CME UF8, which is great in every way, except for the stuck notes, randomly losing connection etc. With the MIDI cable it works, but then I can't use the transport controls on it which was one of the reasons I got it. The driver here is up to its 4th version but sill almost everyone has problems with it (if you look at the CME forum).

A week ago I bought a M-Audio Trigger Finger, which is also a great piece of hardware, I just Can Not get the USB interface to work. I could get my computer and various hosts to see it, but it would lose connection or crash the program after a short time.
I've tried everything, unconnecting every other USB device, checking all the USB BIOS settings, changing USB cables etc, no luck.
Finally I plugged in the MIDI cable to my E-MU soundcard and it works flawlessly, but same thing here: I get left out of the goodies that's only available via USB, especially the Enigma editor which makes it so much easier to program.

When I look around at various support forums and user groups it seems there's not one USB MIDI controller tha just WORKS, instantly, for everyone..

Yes much of this is down to badly written drivers.. but still it seems the exact same drivers work for some people and not for others, whereas using the standard MIDI interface works for almost everyone..

So Is it really hard to write MIDI USB drivers? Could it be USB MIDI will never work for everyone?

On the CME forum someone posted this quote from Jim Wright (IBM research):

USB MIDI interfaces have been around since early 1999. After Apple released the first USB Macintoshes, manufacturers like Emagic, Roland, Steinberg and Mark of the Unicorn scrambled to put out USB-compatible MIDI interfaces. Now there are a dozen or more on the market, from simple palm-sized 1-in, 1-out boxes to rackmount multicable interfaces with SMPTE and audio I/O. Happily, a standard method for putting MIDI on a USB cable is defined by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF, www.usb.org). Unhappily, the MIDI Manufacturers Association never endorsed the USB MIDI spec¡ªand you¡¯ll see why in a moment.

USB has been very successful in replacing, or at least displacing, many of the disparate computer-networking formats like serial, parallel, PCI or SCSI ports. Printers, modems, scanners, removable media drives and gadgets we didn¡¯t even know we needed just a couple of years ago are now using USB cables. There are great advantages to USB, such as the ability to connect up to 127 devices of all kinds to a single computer (using bridges and hubs), automatic configuration (no more IRQ or SCSI ID nightmares), the ability to ¡°hot-swap¡± devices, and higher potential throughput than any of the formats it replaces, with the exception of SCSI.

None of these solutions are compatible with each other, which negates the entire philosophy of MIDI and USB.

So what¡¯s the problem with MIDI? According to Jim Wright at IBM Research, a longtime member of the MMA Technical Standards Board and chairman of the organization¡¯s working group concerned with new transports, USB has timing problems that make it problematic for MIDI. He has conducted tests comparing ¡°classic¡± (i.e., serial, parallel, PCI or PCMCIA) interfaces against USB interfaces, looking at their round-trip latency (the amount of time it takes for a MIDI event to get in and out of the interface) and their jitter (the variation in the latency). He found the latency in the USB interfaces to be between seven and eight milliseconds, about three times that of the classic interfaces. This is not in itself an insurmountable problem, because musicians adjust to small latencies in sound sources quite well¡ªa bass player and a lead guitarist standing seven feet away from each other usually have no trouble staying together.

But the jitter in USB interfaces was also much higher than the older interfaces¡ªabout twice as high, meaning (to continue our analogy) that the two players could at any given moment be five feet away from each other, and the next moment be 10 feet away¡ªand constantly moving. In another analogy, which Wright likes to use, imagine playing a slightly arpeggiated guitar chord: The jitter could make it sound as if one of your fingers jerked slightly while you were playing the chord. And for tight grooves and thick MIDI data streams with lots of aftertouch or controllers, this level of jitter is really unacceptable. Wright also found that when you add audio to the USB stream, the jitter goes up another 50%¡ªso it¡¯s three times what MIDI musicians have had to deal with in the past.

according to this USB MIDI was not a good idea to start with..
could MIDI via firewire be better?