I have a Casio 101 keyboard that I bought in 1987 and a $15 MIDI-to-USB cable. It's hard to describe how satisfying it is to see it continue to work as an input device for a computer manufactured in 2022.
I remember the first time I saw MIDI in action: I was in a mall in the mid-to-late 1980s and ComputerLand had a full sized keyboard hooked up to an Apple IIgs, which was playing The Entertainer while the notes scrolled across the screen on a color display. The real piano sound that came out was piped through some great speakers and I thought it was the most amazing technology I had ever seen. Think about that for a second: That tech remained almost untouched for 35 years. Incredible.
This video has a short bit in the middle about one of the first MIDI keyboards which still works with modern equipment (starting at 7:55): The History of the Prophet Synthesizer https://youtu.be/Ruh0B5QKBMs?t=476
And for fun: 1986: MIDI and the MUSICAL MICROS | BBC Archive: https://youtu.be/aADkqmvy44o
Related (non-MIDI) note: I recently found this video about making electronic dance music on an Amiga in the early 1990s and learned quite a lot about how music-techies back then we're geeking out. Super fun - I'm not a musician, so I honestly had no real idea what was possible back then.
No-one uses MIDI 2.0 yet, we don’t need it! MPE (https://www.midi.org/midi-articles/midi-polyphonic-expressio...) is only just being adopted (with poly aftertouch instruments and keybeds like the ones in the ASM Hydrasynth).
MIDI has proved amazingly resilient, whether over 5-pin DIN, the increasingly common TRS 1/4” jacks (common on Eurorack or guitar pedals, where space is a premium) or the utterly ubiquitous MIDI over USB. (And ethernet, can’t forget that). Everything digitally controlled speaks MIDI - and not just music, the stage lighting world is all MIDI too. I think that there is a real case that it’s the second most successful wired physical-layer protocol behind Ethernet.
[1] - http://www.dmx-512.com/dmx-protocol/dmx-protocol-basics/
And MIDI also has SYSEX to handle arbitrary data.
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.
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.
The context in which I was writing was the previous comments, not your experience.
Maybe I wasn't clear when I said "you can use MTS" and "support seems widespread".
It's not part of the base MIDI standard, but it is standardized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_tuning_standard
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.
That’s what I said and what I meant. The Venn diagram of disagreement with me congrues with the Venn diagram of self disagreement.
Maybe there's a market in retrofitting old synthesizers like the kits available for some pre-MIDI classics ;)
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.
https://www.grammy.com/news/technical-grammy-award-ikutaro-k...
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.
Seriously: https://www.sequential.com/2015/01/sequential-back/
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
The first implementation of a numerical control programming language was developed at the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory in the late 1950s... The main standardized version used in the United States was settled by the Electronic Industries Alliance in the early 1960s. A final revision was approved in February 1980 as RS-274-D.
So yeah. Remember what Gibson said about the future...
Check out the Example section for the 1964 RUNOFF document editor. You might see some familiar things
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF
Also communication protocols have pretty long lifespans. Take https://www.kermitproject.org/ for example or the wire standard for Ethernet
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/
Basically there are loads of different railway gauges around the world, and indeed, inside the USA itself, which historically had no single standard size.
All roads, railways, and thus tunnels and bridges everywhere are very approximately multiples of the width of a horse's pectoral/pelvic girdles. Nothing especially Roman or anything else about it.