Re: [LAD] JACK & MIDI

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 01:32:32PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:

> so, fons, you're proposing one or both of:
>
> 1) that this community somehow magically defines a new standard
> for musical information, despite the complete failure of
> the entire field of music technology to do this for the
> last 30 years.
>
> 2) that the relatively few pieces of s/w (and in all likelihood,
> absolutely no hardware) that actually use this new
> standard internally get to save a few cycles at the
> expense of the dozens and dozens of existing s/w and h/w
> implementations of MIDI itself.
>
> Neither makes any sense to me.

And neither I propose.

Using wider data types internally (we are running on 32 and 64-bit
machines today !) is not 'defining a new standard for the entire
field of music technology'. Jack *has* actually taken this step
for audio data, by representing all samples as floats while the
hardware world, including almost all sound cards I know of, is
still using 16 and 24 bit integers.

It would at least allow software apps to use more fine grained
musical parameters. It *could* create a problem when you have
to convert back to plain old 8-bit MIDI to be sent to a physical
port. But that's the same one we have for audio samples - if you
go back from float to 16-bit you can have clipping and you need
to dither. Nobody makes any fuss about that. Jack just does it
behind the scenes.

And no, I'm not concerned about a few more cycles, but it seems
others are, if they have round a float note number to an int.
Which is completely silly once you consider the number of cycles
that will be required to calculate the actual samples for the
same note.

Ciao,

-- 
FA
Laboratorio di Acustica ed Elettroacustica
Parma, Italia
Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa.
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