Introduction to MIDI 2.0

[Mike Kent]

I wrote a new article that explains more about the new features

and shows some of the basic ideas of the new message format.

https://bit.ly/2HUlsTb

[Joe Muscara]

Nice work!

[tfort]

Great to see the progress, Mike. I hope products will be widely available in 2020. Out of curiosity, will MIDI 2.0 obviate the need for MPE or has MPE been incorporated into MIDI 2.0?

[stoken6]

I'm confused by some of the points in the article. You say that MIDI 2.0 doesn't specify the connector, but elsewhere that 5pin DIN will NOT be used for MIDI 2.0.

 

Is there a recommendation on what connector to use on hardware instruments? I'm a bit concerned that all hardware will support MIDI 2.0 as USB devices, and virtually none as USB hosts.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Mike Kent]

I'm confused by some of the points in the article. You say that MIDI 2.0 doesn't specify the connector, but elsewhere that 5pin DIN will NOT be used for MIDI 2.0.

 

Is there a recommendation on what connector to use on hardware instruments? I'm a bit concerned that all hardware will support MIDI 2.0 as USB devices, and virtually none as USB hosts.

 

Cheers, Mike.

 

MIDI 2.0 is meant to run on a wide variety of transports. Transferring data is done inside the Universal MIDI Packet format described in the article. Most transports send data in packets natively, so most will be able to support this. The 5 pin DIN transport sends MIDI as a byte stream, not in packets, so it presents a unique challenge. These days USB is the most common transport for MIDI, readily sends MIDI in a packet format, so is probably primary target that most manufacturers are thinking about for the first hardware products. Of course, software can talk to other software through the OS (if the OS supports the Universal MIDI Packet). I think it would be natural to see use some kind of network connection between devices and in the long run that might be the solution that gets widest support. But it's not easy to predict the future. We can write specifications but it's up to MIDI companies to decide what parts they will implement. It will take some years for new features to make their way across a wide range of products. None of this will happen over night.

[RandyFF]

Wow, nice work. Yeah, as I was reading this I was wondering how so much info would go over a slow MIDI 1.0 din cable.

 

I remember when networks back in the 80's and 90's were such a headache to configure, and nowadays a lot of that work is done in the background and is very easy to get hooked up. It's helpful having a large user base, this kind of thing gets handled 10xs faster than for the small music industry.

 

MIDI 2.0 however has a ton of moving, variable parts, and while the idea is to make complex interactions easier, I would imagine there'd be a lot of configuration still- esp if manufacturers cherry pick what part of the spec they support.

 

There's a ton of things that are possible with MIDI 2.0 that are just a mind flunk for most of us with the current standard. Thanks for moving this forward!