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Apple iOS 4.2 to Support MIDI
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- derefr 16y agoWarning, completely tangential: I misread this headline as "OSX 10.7 will support MDI." Oddly, that makes about as much sense, given 10.7's fullscreen-app focus, since there haven't been any indications of what happens if you try to fullscreen an app with palette windows.
- sudont 16y agoI believe that fullscreen mode is a separate view that the application can use if the developer creates one. And the palette windows will most likely be in the style of iPhoto, so Apple will most likely public classes for these, a la BWToolkit: http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/images/transparent3.png http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/images/transparent3.png
- elblanco 16y agoThis is great, all of the modern iOS devices are powerful enough to run as soft synths...combined with a multitouch interface, there's no reason I can't have a bank of 303s and 808s such with knobs and sliders and stuff I can move about as well as on a real piece of hardware. If I setup a few iPads I can interface with all that stuff at the same time.
- sudont 16y agoIsn't midi somewhat hacked for theater to coordinate stage events? If so, interesting uses of soft controls to mix together banks of lights in realtime, in addition to ambient sounds and other stage controls could result.
- icegreentea 16y agoYeah, most of them run off a version of MIDI. Though to be honest, I can't really imagine this resulting in anything more 'interesting' than what we have so far. The 'hard' controls used pretty optimized. Whatever clunkiness is there is kinda hard to get around, due to the sheer level of complexity involved. I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. What are the interfaces in real life? Sliders. Granted, an iPad might be able to do funner things than equipment of comparable price, but top of the line equipment (which have motors to move the sliders/knobs to the presets you saved!) is pretty much as flexible and powerful as it can be.
- sudont 16y agoHopefully the controls would be something beyond NSSlider-s, and allow for chaining commands together into groups that automatically move together, creating effect banks that can dynamically be broken down and controlled. I doubt it'll take off beyond small, avant-garde stage shows, as most theater effects would be pre-run ahead of time. Might be a stupid idea, but I'm basing a guess on twitter:blogging :: monome :keyboard. See also the painful complexity here: http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-dmx.pdf http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-d...
- icegreentea 16y agoYes yes... I remember... masters, submasters, scenes, cues... I was the sound guy. My console was like a 3rd of the size with a quarter of the buttons. My manual was less than a 10th the size as the lighting one. But I got more cables hanging out the back. So it will matches up.
- anigbrowl 16y agoI mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. Sure, sliders are convenient. But there are accelerometers, image processors, DSP on the microphone input...and multitouch lets you do some thing that don't make sense with a mouse, like pinching to alter the ratio of two two-dimensional values at once (or more). The CPU in the phone or pad is fast enough to do some fun things with complex numbers or whatever and spit out the results via MIDI to a heavy duty DSP. That would be quite useful for simulating vocal tracts or physical modeling things like woodwind reeds or brass tonguing (the different sounds a trumpet player can make by how they put their lips/tongue to the trumpet mouthpiece). There is gear to do this sort of thing already, but most hardware has only multiple 1-dimensional controllers or a joystick, effectively requiring a whole new set of playing techniques. Smartphones make it easier to adapt the input device to the specifications of the player rather than the other way around.
- edkennedy 16y agoA victory for musicians and visualists alike. Musicians have been using touch screens ever since the several thousand dollar Lemur[1], now access will be available to all with iPhone. [1]http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php
- tibbon 16y agoI'm just excited to have a nice midi 16-step sequencer in it. Too bad I'll still need a Midi-CV convertor for most modular stuff.
- anigbrowl 16y agoYou're kinda stuck there, because the capacitors on the audio output of your phone/soundcard/digital synth filter out out the DC that your CV inputs want. I know people who have removed the caps on keyboard outputs and got working audio -> CV but it's pretty drastic unless you're very electronics-savvy. One cheap workaround you might want to investigate, depending on what analog modules you have, is to send a fixed, high-frequency oscillator out from your digital gear to the input of an analog envelope follower, and modulate the digital oscillator with a digital LFO (using MIDI to play with the LFO frequency). This is likely to yield 'interesting' sounds but unless you have precision gear and can do log-linear scaling (eg freq. > pitch) it'll be hard to do anything useful. PAIA has a fairly cheap converter in module rack form factor, just in case you didn't know: http://www.paia.com/midi2cv.asp http://www.paia.com/midi2cv.asp
- meatsock 16y agoa less cheap workaround is http://www.motu.com/products/software/volta http://www.motu.com/products/software/volta it'll work with anything with DC-coupled TRS outputs, i.e. any decent quality soundcard. very glad to see more music tech threads on HN. i think the iphone is gonna revolutionize computer music, the problem from the beginning has been the interface -- WIMP doesnt make a lot of sense for the way music works in the brain, imo
- andybak 16y agoDamn shame that Android MIDI and audio support is lagging as then there would be scope for companies to innovate with Android based specialist hardware.
- smackfu 16y agoJust like a real computer!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- travisjeffery 16y agoThe only difference it seems is that is will there will be MIDI support through a USB connection, MIDI support already exists in tons of apps through WIFI and unlike the article said is being used very seriously in quite a few top DJs I know, Deadmau5, Michael Woods, Laidback Luke, Richie Hawtin at least. The latter who actually got involved writing Griid. So it's already very serious, Griid, BeatMaker, MidiPad, etc. etc. do exactly what the author of the article says he wants -- they're basically a grid full of clips that you can quickly launch through the iPad, and most of them you can switch the interface from clip launching to controlling effects and other parameters of your DAW through MIDI. Actually not only that but some like TouchOSC also support OSC which is light years better than MIDI. One good thing at least will be the reliability of having a hard connection rather than sending your MIDI over WIFI. In terms of professional use you're still going to need at least a sound card and mixer as well, so the computer is not going away. So all-in-all not really exciting as they're making it out to be.
- rayboyd 16y agoWith TouchOSC you have to use a bridge to convert the OSC messages sent over the network to MIDI for the DAW to pick up. (I use OSCulator with Ableton). 2 way messaging can be a pain, it can be laggy, is quite time consuming and unintuitive to map controls compared to the plug and play nature of a normal hardware midi controller. This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW.
- travisjeffery 16y agoYeah I know how it works. MIDI is just one of those things that you're glad happened and it works but you really wish everyone at once would just switch over to OSC as soon as possible. "This should alleviate that by removing the bridge, the need for OSC and the ability to directly send MIDI over USB to the DAW." But no it won't, the TouchOSC and OSCulator guys choose to use OSC and the only way they're going to send MIDI directly is if they build it into the app which they just do now utilizing WIFI.
- 16y ago
- jbarham 16y agoSomewhat tangential, but Jaron Lanier has some interesting comments/criticisms of MIDI in his book "You Are Not a Gadget". I'd quote him, but it would go against the spirit of the book. ;) Well worth reading in full.
- anigbrowl 16y agoI haven't read the book, but if my synthesis of 10 serious commentaries/reviews is accurate then I think he is dead wrong about MIDI. Crash course: MIDI is a serial protocol for encoding of musical control signals at ~32k baud, for an effective timing resolution of ~1 millisecond. Most signals are 7-bit, yielding 128 possible note or control values, freely distributable across 16 channels. There are 120 possible control assignments; the other 7 (128 - 120 - note) are mostly reserved for meta-control, allowing private realtime parameters with up to 14-bit resolution, or bidirectional non-realtime block data transfer for firmware updates and configuration backup. About 2/3 of the control assignments are standardized, and any MIDI device is supposed to offer a 'general MIDI' configuration with standardized sounds (trumpet, cello, clarinet etc.) controlled by standardized control assignments (cc#32 is always Volume, cc#74 is brightness aka treble, etc.). With these you can specify pretty much anything that could be written in standardized music notation in much the same manner as a music box or player piano. It is supposed to deliver a reasonable approximation of all the instruments in an orchestra and allow control of the way they're actually played, giving you up to 16 'virtual musicians' playing up to 24 notes at once. Of course, this is way too good to be true. The hideous sounds found buried in the control panel or on Geocities-type web pages are coming out of the cheap-ass General MIDI 'synthesizer' implemented in windows and/or on your soundcard. Nobody in the real world uses this except for those awful 'home keyboards' - usually cheap, although there are also vastly overpriced versions aimed at rural churches and community centers, where people who live far away from a music store learned to play on a cheap Casio and want something that sounds better but works the same way - Bank 0, program 47 will always give you a harp sound, changing controller # 74 will always let you 'damp' the strings etc. This is a huge market which subsidizes the development of more interesting instruments. There is a parallel sub-market devoted to painstaking digital reproductions of acoustic and electric organs & pianos for more serious musicians, but which fit into a car instead of a truck. Now, General MIDI sounds awful for three reasons: poorly sampled source sounds, crudely implemented modulation of same, and lazy transcription of musical data. The sounds are typically short (50 ms) recordings originally compressed to fit on a 16k EPROM. The modulations are usually bad approximations of inappropriately linear DSP transforms designed to run on some 8-bit uController. The transcriptions are generally bare minimum with no attention paid to articulation or the ebb and flow of musical performance. After all, it's going to sound pretty awful no matter how much you fine tune the control data, so why polish a turd? In fairness, MIDI has been around as a protocol since 1980 and General MIDI was defined in 1991. The specification came before there were any commercial products capable of implementing it, hence the cut corners described above in a rush to look standards-compliant. Although the technology of audio reproduction has improved enormously and allows effectively perfect fidelity since then, the 'bare minimum' ethic required for standards compliance has never gone away and you can buy quite expensive keyboards that make awful-sounding GM 'music,' identical to that of 10+ years ago. It is this ugliness and sterility that Lanier objects to: far from being a highest common factor, General MIDI instead became a lowest common denominator, and is only ever heard cranking out robotic versions of jaded pop hits. Where Lanier goes wrong is in assuming that this is a limitation of the protocol. And with only 7 bits for any given musical gesture, it is quite limited. But the main reason 'MIDI sounds so bad' is the ubiquity of the General MIDI standard. You might as well say a guitar has 21 frets and 6 strings, so it can't produce more than 126 sounds, or that your computer keyboard's 104 keys impose an unacceptable limitation on what you can write. The reality is that while you'll never get a pleasing rendition of 16 musicians playing 24 notes from a single MIDI device, You can get astonishingly good renditions of a single musician's performance. Pretty much any real-world instrument can be beautifully synthesized and/or sampled now, and the audible changes from musical modulation accurately reproduced. Though they may use a grand piano on stage, most pro musicians will (secretly) admit they are perfectly happy with the digital version they have at home, and its multi-gigabyte sample library of conservatory pianos that are not for sale at any price. The latency and timing limitations of a ~32k serial protocol are so minute that are they below the threshold of perception for most people; they are orders of magnitude below the fastest muscular repetition rates (note that the much higher sensitivity of acoustic discrimination is for audio rather than control signals). Latency and inconsistencies can be further reduced in importance both technically (on-the-fly reserialization yields ~100 uSec accuracy) and/or musically-aware error correction: for example, quickly strumming a guitar necessarily limits the variations in force with which each string is plucked, such that the 7-bit data for this parameter can be scaled to an appropriate range to yield a much finer expressive resolution than if it were limited to absolute values. More importantly, a quality electronic instrument allows incoming MIDI parameter data to be freely filtered, assigned and scaled to DSP parametric data running at audio speeds, from where the sky is pretty much the limit, whether your goal is the accurate reproduction of natural sounds or the creation of entirely new expressive posibilities. The main barrier to more musical expressivity is not the protocol but the physical hardware of piano keys, knobs, pedals and so on; most devices require everything to done via the fingers or tapping one's foot, and the market for more exotic sensors is small enough that they've been expensive. So MIDI on one's phone offers various new (-ly affordable) possibilities, such as waving it through the air like a conductor's baton and sending the orientation and acceleration data out via MIDI, or using the camera to track changes and reparameterizing them as MIDI. This is not to say that acoustic instruments and musicianship are any less interesting than they ever were, but to dispute the idea that music made with (or even by) computers is necessarily mechanical or musically restricted. Now there are other standards for digital notation and reproduction, from CSound (infinite accuracy, utterly unmusical) to OSC (Open Sound Control - great system, but more for people who like synthesizer construction than for performance, and hence ignored by most instrument manufacturers). But the expressive possibilities of MIDI are so great that 30 years after its inception it remains the standard protocol. If you don't need things like the 'standard library' of General MIDI - and most serious musicians don't - then version 1.0 of the standard is still the norm, and considered perfectly acceptable even on very expensive gear (indeed, the more expensive the more likely it is to have the base protocol implementation than any 'improvements'). Incidentally, JL is also an expert on ancient instruments, and skilled in playing them. In this video, he introduces (among other things) the Khaen, an organ-like instrument from Laos and provides a neat explanation of why organs are the direct intellectual forebears of computers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW1BBbvrEYA&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW1BBbvrEYA&feature=relat... I imagine Don Knuth's fetish for pipe organs is motivated by a similar perception.
- zandorg 16y agoI once played a song at a gig in 2000 (amongst other songs), which was just me pressing keys to trigger samples on my Psion Series 5 handheld. I had wired the speaker to a 3.5mm socket to go directly to the mixer! I'm sure it was a first.