Finally: MIDI 2.0
Related link: http://www.midi.org/newsviews/hdmidipr.shtml
How many digital music standards are more than 20 years old, still in version 1.0, and yet in daily use on untold millions of devices? Controlling everything from cell phone ringtones to Las Vegas extravaganzas, MIDI (the Musical Instrument Digital Interface) would have to be near the top of that short list. Still, musicians have been clamoring for greater MIDI resolution almost since the beginning.
Yesterday, the MIDI Manufacturers* Association, stewards of the spec, released a teaser announcement called “MIDI Industry Investigates Major Update to MIDI Protocol.” At the AES convention on October 8, the MMA will discuss High-Definition MIDI (HD-MIDI™). The press release refers to HD-MIDI as a proposal under discussion, but the trademark sign makes me believe the group is thinking seriously about this.
“This major update to MIDI would provide greater resolution in data values, increase the number of MIDI channels, and support the creation of entirely new kinds of MIDI messages,” continues the announcement.
Current MIDI resolution for most control changes is just 128 steps (7 bits), although receiving devices can interpolate between those for smoother playback, and there are other workarounds, such as ganging contollers for 14-bit (16,384-step) resolution. Likewise, the stock number of channels (which typically correspond to individual instruments in an ensemble) is just 16—a mighty small orchestra.
One of the reasons MIDI has lasted so long and been so successful is because its backward compatibility. You can plug a keyboard controller made yesterday into a synth from 1984 and—assuming the latter is working—still play it. The flip side of that compatibility is that the transmission hardware is locked at a speed comparable to that of a 28kbps modem. Even if a new controller generated high-resolution data, the pipeline couldn’t carry it.
With the advent of software synthesizers, MIDI messages are being transmitted completely inside computers, so the speed limit has eased, but there are still many areas where greater resolution and more channels would allow increased expressivity.
Way back in 1998, I moderated a brainstorming group charged with outlining MIDI 2.0. Some of our hopes were:
- More controllers (especially non-keyboard controllers)
- 3D spatialization control instead of just basic panning
- Looping information in MIDI files
- Peer-to-peer “discovery” rather than blind data transmission
- Sample-accurate sync, and
- Better marketing
That last item is especially interesting. When most people hear the word MIDI, they think of the annoying tunes that wheeze out of mid-’90s Web pages. Contrary to popular belief, MIDI doesn’t “sound bad”—it has no sound at all. It’s simply a communications protocol. No one says Postscript looks bad; the output quality depends on the printer.
Similarly, a well-crafted MIDI file played through a high-quality synthesizer sounds great. That’s something you hear every day, whether you realize it or not. Still, the world has changed a lot since 1983, and it’s exciting to see this important spec advancing.
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*The lack of an apostrophe after “Manufacturers” always bugged me until I discovered that the word is attributive (descriptive) rather than possessive. [Back to article]
What do you want to see in MIDI 2.0?
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If it's from the MMA, then it's not for the consumer's benefit. The MMA is simply a book publisher for proprietary protocol specifications (mislabeled as "open standards") created by its hardware manufacturing members. Here's how it works. Let's say Yamaha creates this proprietary feature for their upcoming product line. Yamaha engineers do this mostly on their own. They've done the design work so of course they want to use it. And they want all the other major hardware manufacturers to support it, so that it becomes a big selling point (that they get to capitalize on first). They pass around this spec to the other MMA hardware manufacturers who may or may not make a few minor change suggestions. But for sure, not much is changed, because that costs time/money. Then the MMA adopts it, without any public peer review whatsoever (and they admit that it's their policy not to get anything peer-reviewed by any outside entity) so that the MMA has some more books to sell, to make money. These protocols are _not_ open. They are not openly peer-reviewed. They do not get designed by parties who don't have a vested financial interest in slanting the spec toward a hardware manufacturer's idea of what he thinks he can sell for a profit. Worse, the majority of software folks aren't even involved in designing/reviewing these specs. And that's why most everything that has come out of the MMA since the original MIDI spec has exhibited poor integration/adoption, unstable buggy implementation, incompatibilities, and other telltale signs of a closed development process being misrepresented as "open standards".
The MMA is not an open standards organization, and neither is anything coming out of it. Please remember that when promoting its agenda (ie, publicizing its PR to promote its book publishing business).
Clarification: HD ≠ 2.0
Admittedly, my headline about MIDI “2.0” was fanciful, but I wanted to share this clarification MMA President Tom White just sent. It seems that HD-MIDI is more of an extension to MIDI 1.0 than a new version, although the new features are certainly some of the highest on everyone’s wish list.
There have actually been numerous extensions to the spec over the years; see http://www.midi.org/about-midi/specshome.shtml. That’s one way the MMA has been able to keep the spec alive without sacrificing backward compatibility. —David Battino
My only comment is that HD-MIDI may or may not be MIDI 2, depending on what you think MIDI 2 is, and we consciously chose not to call it that for that reason. Your own list of things MIDI 2 should have is a good example: we aren't addressing the majority of them with HD-MIDI.
MIDI 2 as a marketing term also has problems because so many people already have a preconceived notion of what it should be... so when and if we ever do come up with something that is extensive enough to be considered a new MIDI, we may still not want to call it MIDI2.
For now, all we are doing is increasing the resolution of existing MIDI messages, and making it possible to create entirely new ones. We don't consider that to be MIDI2, but certainly it's a major step in the direction.
Sweet
I hope the industry embraces it. The current version has been cramping my style for a while.