Re: [linux-audio-dev] News about sequencers (not my own though!)

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] News about sequencers (not my own though!)
From: Eli Brandt (eli_AT_gong.music.cs.cmu.edu)
Date: la tammi  22 2000 - 14:16:56 EST


David Olofson wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Dan Hollis wrote:
> > Actually defining a new standard transport medium for MIDI would fix a =
> lot
> > of things. 38400 baud really isnt enough anymore. 10baseT anyone?
>
> There are a few new protocols available - most failed, as they only
> give a slight improvement and means that you need new software, new
> interfaces, new synths etc...

Microsoft and Roland have released a 1.0 version of their spec for MIDI
over USB, and Roland is shipping products that implement it. They
designed it with less concern for timing accuracy than I would have (it
uses bulk transport mode: no fairness or timing guarantees), but in
average bandwidth it is certainly better than 31.25 kbps. I'm biased,
but I don't think the industry considers this the last word in MIDI over
USB. MotU, for example, is using a proprietary protocol with
timestamps; I think they were demoing 1/3-msec jitter.

Yamaha's mLan (MIDI and audio over 1394) looked pretty good a year ago;
I don't know what's been happening since. It's isochronous, with IIRC a
1-msec MIDI frame spacing after TDM. For sub-frame positioning, you got
one timestamp for all the MIDI events in the frame.

Aside from souping up the physical layer, there's been a lot of work
done on getting beyond MIDI 1.0's logical structure, but we all know
where that's gone so far. Some current work is taking the interesting
approach of starting with non-synth applications for which MIDI fails
particularly hard, and leveraging from there.

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+@cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/


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