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Comment by hjanssen | Hacker News Reader

MIDI is such an interesting standard. Anyone who has anything to do with music equipment can attest that it is literally everywhere. Every (decent) synth nowadays has at least a midi input. You can sync practically everything with MIDIs clock function (which was VERY painful to do beforehand, especially if you tried to sync multiple synths). Its interesting to see if MIDI 2.0 can follow up with that. Certainly, MIDI is here to stay and i cant wait to see what cool things people are going to create with it!

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> Every (decent) synth nowadays has at least a midi input

Well that sentence could've been straight from a music/computer mag from early/mid 1980s - that's how old MIDI is, using DIN jackets and all.

Source: owned an Atari ST using Steinberg 24 track sequencing software to control Yamaha DX-7 (every New Wave band had one of those on stage), early digital drum machines, digital reverbs/echoes, and other devices around 1985.

Cubase represent!

My dad was a music teacher and a big proponent of getting the school to purchase Ataris for this reason.

He in later years also decided to build an electric organ with complete foot pedals and all.

MIDI never says die.

You posted all that, and didn't link to any audio of what you made? Come on, man, we can never have enough DX-7.

> Its interesting to see if MIDI 2.0 can follow up with that.

there lies the rub. MIDI is quite simple. if MIDI 2.0 is error-prone to implement, it will fail as literally no one has time for that

I have not checked the docs yet, but from what I read so far the protocol is actually easier, with clearer fixed size messages for usual operations, with much more information.

But it is always required MIDI 1.0 compatibility, so if your device need the extra bits, it activate the MIDI 2.0 protocol. IIRC it is possible to use other parts of the MIDI 2.0 as MIDI CI with the old MIDI protocol.

Also things like MPE I think are really improved, as current MPE is an ugly hack using channels. Time wise MIDI 2.0 should be easier to implement than MPE, IMHO.

The most difficult part would be the MIDI CI (Capability Inquiry) to first set up the MIDI 2.0 protocol, and then to send information about current device. But the info about the current device is actually a JSON file, so not really difficult.

While I won't deny that midi has been a great and long lasting standard, syncing clock via cv was always pretty straightforward, you just lacked thru so everything was daisy chained directly.

CV being effectively monoplexed meant a lot of connections to control a lot of parameters on one or more instruments.

Of course, the modular crowd is still happy to live in this world, but that's more an aesthetic choice, imo.

> more an aesthetic choice

What's the alternative?

Tunneling the analog control signal into digital packets would be easy, then it's just a matter of picking the best PHY interface to send them around.

Don't worry about sound issues, though. Old hybrid synths (analog generators with digital control and parameters storage) were very recognizable from fully analog ones (purely CV controlled) just because say a pitch bend mapped to a 8 bit sampling of a potentiometer, which translates to 7 bit up and 7 bit down, wouldn't have the minimum quantization to let the listener perceive it as an analog control. Today cheap MCUs allow adding digital control to analog generators, filters, envelopes etc. to a granularity level (16+ bit) so that any realtime variation would be identical sound wise to a fully analog controlled synth. Latency wouldn'b an issue as we're talking about control and not sound generation: MCUs with no or minimal (realtime) OSes would never impose such higher latencies as in virtual instruments etc. Having an ADSR kick like two milliseconds after the key is pressed would hardly be a problem.

> Tunneling the analog control signal into digital packets would be easy

Yeah, but at that point, you're already giving up the "analog purity" that analog synth fans love so much. Might as well just use midi; and then you might as well just use soft-synths; and then you might as well just use Propellerhead Reason, so you can have all the flexibility of gate/CV fully virtualized.

I meant the control signal, not the audio signal. The audio stays analog, but the CV once sampled into a digital word can be packed together with other controls, moved around without fear of losing accuracy, and makes trivial for example to record and play it.

I may be wrong, but that sounds kind of like what open sound control(osc) does.

http://opensoundcontrol.org/spec-1_0

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