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Comment by damnfine | Hacker News Reader

Okay, I will be the guy.

MIDI is dead.

The latency, is simply not musical. I have worked with midi since the early 90s. Its a low baud serial connection. Play 5 notes at once? Nope, its now a really fast appregio. Got a nicer keyboard that sends velocity, aftertouch and control commands? Even more quickly flooded.

The problem is, its such a widely implemented standard, and yet there are few, if any, out of the box midi-on-chip solutions that make sense.

If someone produced a new standard, focusing on latency, and somehow made a midi failover/compatibility mode. Midi2 if you will... that could be easily implemented by device makers. The whole world would get better music.

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"MIDI is dead.

The latency, is simply not musical. I have worked with midi since the early 90s. Its a low baud serial connection. Play 5 notes at once? Nope, its now a really fast appregio."

I suspect that's wholly upon your equipment. I've got an old 486 with an AWE32 on it. Never once in my life have I encountered the problems you describe and my keyboard was a DIN5 connected Korg.

"Got a nicer keyboard that sends velocity, aftertouch and control commands? Even more quickly flooded."

Let me guess, you were using the game port on the back of your sound card instead of a sound card with a dedicated MIDI input/output?

Open Sound Control is effectively MIDI2 - it ameliorates all of the obvious shortcomings of the MIDI standard. It isn't hugely popular, because MIDI is good enough for 99% of users 99% of the time.

http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control

Correct me if I'm wrong, but these days everyone usually sends MIDI over USB. It doesn't have any of the problems you described, every computer has USB ports in some form or another. Every operating system has default drivers for these devices, so they usually work out of the box. Yes, MIDI as a hardware standard is dying. But why should we care when we have something more universal that replaces it?

Sure, but we need the physical layer. Somewhere between the 5 +1 pin DIN and the logic.

We need a standard to replace it becaue music should not nessitate the use of a seprate computer to communicate.

Beyond that I could dive in to the MIDI signaling standard itself, and why it is outdated for sending most types of relevant digital information using todays synthesis and controller technology.

USB isn't optoisolated. This is its killer flaw as a replacement MIDI transport.

It can be, see https://www.adafruit.com/product/2107

Surprised the high-end gear doesn't built it in!

You have system configuration problems.

What you are describing would stop the entire music industry from functioning.

I would agree that you probably can't literally hear the delay among five note-on messages if nothing else is happening. That'd be about .5ms which is pretty insignificant.

But it does become a real thing if you're sending a lot more than that around, like pitch, velocity etc.

It doesn't affect the music industry much because MIDI is overwhelmingly a software standard not a hardware standard these days, so the low baud rate doesn't apply.

Edit: Wait, no, 5ms which is heading towards noticability but not there yet.

Each midi note on and off always sends both pitch and velocity.

The first byte tells you it is a note on or note off and the MIDI channel, the second byte tells you the pitch and the third byte tells you the velocity.

I should have said pitch bend and aftertouch.

Well there's MIDI the electronic standard, and MIDI the musical serialization format. The former is moribund, the latter definitely isn't.

Fiar enough. I was looking at it as a whole system. Because if I connect my keyboard or pedal, it isnt just the data format. But I am mostly talking about the physical standard in my post. Its just infuriating I still suffer the same or worse delay when using hardware as I did in the 80s.

True, but to put things in proportion: I'll be delighted the day I can have a soft synth with a latency as low as MIDI.

MIDI MPE goes some way to addressing some of these problems.

https://www.midi.org/articles/midi-polyphonic-expression-mpe

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