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Comment by diydsp | Hacker News Reader

This bothers angers me: >To implement MIDI-CI and MIDI 2.0, you need a manufacturers SysEx ID. A SysEx ID by itself is $250 a year

That would be a re-hash of the hobbyist USB VID/PID fiasco. MIDI synthesizers are one of the main non-activities which non-professional people have been doing. So many amateurs and educators whip up MIDI synthesizers in a few hours in a workshop or after work. And that is thanks to MIDI being a dirt-simple, unlicensed standard.

>You will also have access to the MMA Github which has code for MIDI 2.0 to MIDI 1.0 translation (and vis versa)

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This makes me sad and angry at the same time.

My introduction to MIDI was as a cheap-ass soldering-iron wielding 13 year old hooking together components for my Commodore VIC-20. I credit that work for my subsequent career as a scientist, programmer, and mathematician.

$250 a year. To solve a solved problem?

Everyone generates a UUID. Part of the CI setup is mapping the 128-bit UUID to a short identifier. Or some other compression scheme. Hell, even 64-bit random identifiers will almost-surely not collide on a bus.

So much for "hobbyist-friendly".

And totally unnecessary.

I was just listening to the midi 2.0 webminar from the midi association, and as I understood there are some free sysex and ci id for non profits / hobbists, but if you make money out of it you should register. I guess mainly to prevent ID collisions.

It's pure money grabbing. They could just as well avoid collisions by specifying a UUID for the SysEx ID, and then everybody could generate their own independently.

I guess you can use the free IDs, and then place the uuid in the stream or packet. Everybody happy.

In the USB case that simply translates to rogue VID/PID by vendors that don't want to pay the fee.

Steinberg tried the same thing with VST (2, not 3). No one uses (relies on) it.

At the end of the day specs are only as good as adoption. If there is a reliable workaround (or even easier way to do things) than using the UUID then people will do that instead.

Can amateurs club together and form an organisation to administrate allocations from a common ID range? Or just liblically declare that they are going to squat on a particular range?

Haha! All IDs that start with 0x0FEE ;p

Some opensource projects already squat on 0xF055

How would they enforce the SysEx ID charge if someone built a synth for personal use? I've wrote a number of midi programs (sequencing utilities) and never remember implementing a SysEx ID for anything.

Also, it's pretty naive of these guys to assume their Github repo will stay hidden behind a $250 charge for very long.

$250 a year is a pretty small amount, probably about what it costs to keep a registry of SysEx IDs so that manufacturers don't create conflicts.

What's the alternative? This is a bit like MAC addresses - if network gear manufacturers didn't have some type of system for de-conflicting addresses it would be chaos when you bought 2 pieces of gear that conflicted with each other.

In the classic Mac days it was up to each developer to make up a FourCC for their application. I don't remember there ever being any conflicts.

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