I love that a protocol from 1983 is still in very active use. Either it was very well thought out, or the userbase has very limited needs. (actually a little of both.)
> It is also the domain is limited. I mean a piano only has 88 keys and a few pedals and there are maybe 8 octaves or so in Common Practice.
Yeah but MIDI works for so much more than a piano. People use MIDI to program drum VSTs, guitar VSTs, entire orchestras, guzheng VSTs... basically anything musical.
That being said, it's serviceable but not great for a lot of these things, because originally it was meant just for keyboard-controlled synthesizers. The biggest flaw (IMO) is lack of standardization for individual instruments with more varied playing styles and articulations than the piano. As a basic example, for guitar VSTs, if you want to switch between sustain notes and palm mutes, you generally have to play an out-of-range note (a "keyswitch") to alter the articulation. However this keyswitch is different for Ample Sound, Shreddage, Native Instruments guitar libraries, etc. Similarly if you want to slide between notes, some VSTs just let you overlap the note while others make you use a slide keyswitch. Every VST has its own way of MIDI programming that isn't transferrable.
It's like switching between programming languages, except you're building a single program where it uses multiple languages at once in the same file and you have to remember if the current language syntax you're writing uses `elif`, `else if` or is LISP. (I have reference manuals for most VSTs I own bookmarked for this reason.)
The fact that MIDI continues to be used today is, more than anything, the result of "perfect is the enemy of done" IMO. You could redesign something better than MIDI from the ground up, but since everything already supports MIDI there's little motivation when it already works well enough.
Sorry for not being clear, I used the number of piano keys as an example of how limited the domain is. MIDI wasn’t designed to express ranges with 100’s or 1000’s of values. Twelve tone equal temperament is good enough and technology is not going to extend human hearing another four octaves.
What MIDI really got right is flexibility with regard to timbre. The standard was so open that General MIDI only came along later to establish some consistency for timbres.
MIDI doesn’t force you to use 12TET anyway. You can use MTS. Support seems widespread, at least among the equipment and software I use, some of it dating back to the 1980s.
MTS is how you specify how MIDI notes are translated to frequencies, if you desire. You can use it to specify alternative scales, if you desire. The Wikipedia list of hardware and software which supports MTS seems very conservative IMO... my personal experience is that MTS support is reasonably common.
The MIDI 2.0 spec was released in 2020 and is being adopted but that will take time. Think how long it takes for a new USB generation to be widespread and multiply by 5 (people are not buying a new piano or synthesizer every 3 years like they do with a laptop or other digital device)
Maybe there's a market in retrofitting old synthesizers like the kits available for some pre-MIDI classics ;)
I'm fairly confident that MIDI 2.0 is already dead. I really don't like to say that.
It was designed by a large industrial committee, in secret, with no transparency and no input from other interested parties. The opposite of MIDI 1.0. And it just stinks of it. It is overwrought by a long shot, with many bells and whistles nobody is asking for (there's a very specific, and frankly short, list of critical MIDI failings). It has no reference examples and will be awful to implement and to deploy over various transports. When it came out it went over like a lead balloon: nobody seems to want to implement it.
And CCs to handle faders and knobs. And PC to handle patch recall. And separate rx/tx busses. And ability to carry clock. And support for 16 simultaneous channels. Yeah it’s actually really well thought out I’d say
Dave was a brilliant designer, both analogue and digital, but not so great a businessperson; his company, Sequential, who made some of the most beloved electronic instruments - not least the Prophet series - went bankrupt and Yamaha bought the name. Dave went to work for Yamaha and Korg, and then Seer Systems, where he designed the first ever “soft synth” (professional-standard PC synthesiser plugin), Reality. He had all of the acclaim, and I’m sure he did OK, but he did not have the financial success the quality of his work deserved.
Nevertheless, he then founded Dave Smith Instruments, maybe the start of the analogue synth revival (which is going gangbusters now; Eurorack is the coolest hardware hacking scene on the planet). DSi did pretty well, which was great, but here’s what really reveals how beloved Dave was; his old friend Ikutaro had a word with his friend, the president of Yamaha, and more or less asked; “we all love Dave. You’re not using the Sequential name. How about it?” and Yamaha went… “you, know, yeah” and gave him the Sequential name - which still had significant brand equity - for free.
> Instrumental in restoring the Sequential name was Roland’s Founder, Ikutaro Kakehashi, a longtime colleague and friend of Smith’s. “I feel that it’s important to get rid of unnecessary conflict among electronic musical instrument companies,” said Kakehashi. “That is exactly the spirit of MIDI. For this reason, I personally recommended that the President of Yamaha, Mr. Nakata, return the rights to the Sequential name to Dave Smith. And I’m glad to see such a wonderful result—a new product with the Sequential name.”
And in 2021, he sold now-Sequential again under much happier circumstances; $24m to the well-regarded British gear manufacturer Focusrite.
The music gear industry has more than its share of villains - google Uli Behringer sometime - but Dave and Ikutaro were real ones, and the best parts of the industry (including the big Japanese manufacturers, Korg, Roland/Boss, and Yamaha) move in their spirit. And a large part of that is because of the existence of MIDI.
I don't know about 'ugly gaps' but its night and day compared to moving an analog knob with CV. Professional Composer guy may not have an issue. Perhaps indeed they are prolific in their marvelous, professional compositions (perhaps using CV)... but the limited expression of 128 steps is obvious to me. Source: I make techno.
Maybe you are not affected by it. I occasionally find it frustrating, in various scenarios… very slow sweeps by hand, or things like that. I only have problems with the limitation in certain scenarios with electronic sounds. It’s never a problem with sample libraries.
MIDI has 14-value CCs anyway, it’s just that few controllers generate the messages. I don’t k ow how many synths respond to them.
Composers are not really affected by this. Sound engineers are.
It is impossible to create smooth filter sweeps with regular CCs without further smoothing on the receiving end, because the human ear can differentiate between many more than 128 frequencies.
Should have been more clear. Professional film/TV/game composer. By definition we are producers and audio engineers as well.
And yes it truly isn’t a problem, as plugin developers have long since interpolated the 128 steps. If it were a problem, you’d be hearing choppy sweeps in every song and film score out there.
> And yes it truly isn’t a problem, as plugin developers have long since interpolated the 128 steps.
That's the point. It is not an issue for you, because it has been solved in certain receiving software that you use. That does not mean that the issue does not exist, but that it can be mitigated if you use software that allows that and smoothes the sweeps.
It is on one hand but it's also a PITA that holds back innovation and troubles its users with work-arounds.
It's time for a proper new standard using modern capabilities both for audio and control signal transport but it's a very heterogeneous market with tons of legacy, therefore almost impossible to achieve.
The baud rate chosen was extremely well thought out compared to the crazytalk that are standard serial port baud rates.
Specifically, the rate was 31250 bps. Why? Because the huge majority of synthesizer processors at the time had clocks that ran at 1 MHz or integer multiples thereof. Indeed that is still the case forty years later. Ask yourself what 31250 * 32 is.
