In praise of MIDI

[PRR]

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity on The Register

"...a fixed-format serial link at 31,250 bits per second which encodes musical events. Middle C key down. Volume 43. Pitch change.
"The first remarkable thing is that this has been true since 1982 saw the first version released. There's no MIDI 1.1.... The standard is 40 years old and good for another 40, it's so perfectly suited to the task. And if that was the whole story, it'd be remarkable enough. ....."

[potul]

So true. I've always been amazed of how MIDI has stood up for sucha  long time.
Now we have MIDI 2.0 coming, but honestly I haven't checked what's new in it.

[bluebunny]

Yep, pretty incredible that my ancient JX3P (the first or second MIDI synth, depending on whether you believe Sequential or Roland) will still work with MIDI instruments that were designed and built this year.  You could hardly say that of the many, many computer so-called "standards" that have rushed past us in the last forty years and seemingly lingered but fleetingly.

[Digital Larry]

MIDI changed my life!  Both creatively and professionally.  Brilliant invention.

[radio]

This triggers 2 thoughts,an old one and a new:

1.There was a midi module for C64 , that my merchant couldn't get so I had not

   an early access to some basic keyboard control by computer in the early days.

2.I recently stumbled over an add of the brand "stereoping" which offers 3 tools and

   1 controller for further midi control and access you had at some 80ies synth.

   Thats remarkable, that 40 years old products still get some added use.

[ElectricDruid]

+1 for MIDI from me too.

There's various technical things about it that tell you it was designed by people who knew what they were doing. The one-byte "realtime" messages, for example, are designed to be separated out in a UART interrupt and never fed to the parser's input buffer. Or the "running status" idea, which saves plenty of bytes and time, but also makes a lot of sense from a parser's point of view (the status byte is the same, unless you're told different).

It's a very clever system. For me, MIDI 2.0 could just be the same thing speeded up. We could easily do 125KHz or 250KHz nowadays. You can keep your USB MIDI nonsense.

[FSFX]

MIDI was (and still is) an elegantly designed protocol that provides a lot of functionality as well as extensibility whilst not demanding much processing power from the low clock speed CPUs of that time. The simplicity of it also allowed messages to be decoded simply with a UART and a ROM based state machine.

[PRR]

The Web MIDI API topic is touched in November's Journal of the Audio Engineering Society:
AES E-Library
Web MIDI API: State of the Art and Future Perspectives
The Web MIDI API is intended to connect a browser app with Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) devices and make them interact. Such an interface deals with exchanging MIDI messages between a browser app and an external MIDI system, either physical or virtual. The standardization by the World Wide Web (W3C) Consortium started about 10 years ago, with a first public draft published on October 2012, and the process is not over yet. Because this technology can pave the way for innovative applications in musical and extra-musical fields, the present paper aims to unveil the main features of the API, remarking its advantages and drawbacks and discussing several applications that could take benefit from its adoption.
Authors: Baratè, Adriano; Ludovico, Luca A.
Affiliation: Laboratory of Music Informatics Department of Computer Science University of Milan Via G. Celoria, 18 - 20133 Milan, Italy
JAES Volume 70 Issue 11 pp. 918-925; November 2022
Publication Date: November 15, 2022 Import into BibTeX
Permalink: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=22016
File link: https://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20221221/22016.pdf
This is on their "Open Source" list, no fee to read/save.

[anotherjim]

I must confess I find it hard to get a handle on what WebMIDI is supposed to offer.
Real-time remote collaborative performance does not appear to be an aim.

[aron]

Used to make my living off of it!

[garcho]

Another benefit of having a 40-year old standard is that designing and tweaking and hacking and building and programming for MIDI instruments and controllers is a piece of cake. It's fun, even. OSC, not so much. And without the unobtanium! I'm sure some day the supply of cheap DIN or TRS mini jacks will dry up, maybe the right optocouplers will be harder to find, but compared to unobtanium in analog audio, MIDI is cheap and cheerful! I'm building a controller right now with a $5 Raspberry Pico. Does $5 even get you one germanium transistor?

Has anyone used wireless MIDI, "WIDI"? I haven't tried any yet since for me (I only use stand-alone hardware, no computers), it's still the equivalent of buying a $80+ MIDI cable. I'd be willing to spend half that to make my guitar controller wireless, but otherwise it's not even close to worth the cost for any other device.

[free electron]

I must confess I find it hard to get a handle on what WebMIDI is supposed to offer.
Real-time remote collaborative performance does not appear to be an aim.

I like the WebMIDI as dev tool while working on various dsp related things. An example could be constructing quick web/html based user interfaces for Teensy4:

The GUI is just a html file which can be opened in chrome/safari (firefox doesn't implement webmidi) and stored together with the project. It even has a small serial terminal window (again - using web-serial) which displays cpu load and other info sent back from the Teensy. Handy if all you have a a dev board without all the controls, switches etc. For me it's not really the "web" part interesting, but the fact i can use it within a browser. Easy and cross platform by default.

[Mark Hammer]

Although the original MIDI standard has been more than sufficient for a large spectrum of tasks, more recent developments in keybed design have prompted the need for MPE, which extends the sort of information required for each individual note/key. https://www.musicianwave.com/what-is-mpe/  Legacy keybeds treated information about key pressure and modulation as somewhat "global" parameters, applied to everything at once.  More recent keybeds allow for several additional parameters  on a per-key basis, the Roli Seaboard and recent Expressive E Osmose being examples, and I think the Arturia MicroFreak does too.  The article I linked to depicts MPE as "a more immersive, acoustic-like approach to MIDI." which I think captures it in a nutshell.  Of course, for the vast majority of keyboards and tone generators, the original 40 year-old MIDI standard is more than sufficient.

[ElectricDruid]

To be fair, the original MIDI standard included polyphonic aftertouch, as well as the more typical global variety. Only a few instruments used it, but it was there and could have been more widely adopted.

More expression per-note is definitely better though, so it's good see more being done in that direction.

[anotherjim]

Even the basic and more common channel aftertouch could be more useful but in my experience, the mechanical implementation of the pressure strip is poor and takes too much pressure to even start an output. There is also confusion with the aftertouch CC controller, it's just another CC and some controllers let you assign any CC to the pressure strip. Some players don't want aftetouch because they don't have anything that responds to the aftertouch CC, they don't realize it doesn't have to be limited to that.