11 ms·

I think it's quite astonishing how solid the MIDI standard feels -- it's embraced by the entire industry and even though it's nearly 40 years old, it has worked

I think it's quite astonishing how solid the MIDI standard feels -- it's embraced by the entire industry and even though it's nearly 40 years old, it has worked very well for many types of instruments and software that couldn't even have been imagined at the time.

fit2rule 8y ago
Musicians don't throw instruments away like other markets throw their gadgets away. I have a room full of 30-year old synths that still work the same as they did the day I bought them, and they're still awesome - I will never 'upgrade'. They're instruments. It'd be great if the other realms of electronic gadgetry could accomplish the same degree of uptake as electronic musical instruments - however, the anti-patterns that make modern consumer gadgets so appealing to the people who market and sell them, are a smell to musicians who have very little patience for designed obsolescence. Musicians don't tolerate that much .. anyone attempting to induce it in a product intended for music-making will find that they won't get far in this industry.
- stfwn 8y ago
  Hm, I don't agree fully. There is zero hardware innovation for digital keyboards at least. Some old electronic instruments are 'vintage'; what makes a Moog is the vintage Moog sound, so yes, you can't upgrade from there. But most digital tools are not instruments in that sense and definitely have the corporate gadget-marketing schemes going on. - Yamaha's Motif XS has some sounds that were adopted as signature sounds for some subgenres of funk, soul and gospel, but these are just samples that the upgraded versions XF, MX, MOXF have as well for this reason, and I don't see anyone with the XS anymore. - Nord clearly limits the features, storage and processing power of each keyboard they release so that they can upgrade it slightly the following year (the latest 2018 flagship model has 480MB of sample memory vs. the preceding 2015 model's 380MB). - Korg rereleased the Kronos with an SSD instead of a HDD and marketed it as a new machine. You could open it up and DIY for 80 bucks and save yourself ~$1.5k+ upgrade costs. - Roland still slaps the Juno brand name on random iterations of digital instruments that just have an extra button for this or that function that could have been added with a software update if they wanted to. New digital keyboards these days are just software updates that model familiar sounds slightly better, packaged in "new" hardware. The $3.5k pricetag for flagship keyboards that have barely changed in size/shape/material for years is a clear sign. I wonder why no manufacturer has just come out and said "this is our flagship keyboard until 2030, buy it for $2k and subscribe to software updates for $10/month" or "new software verson at $100 every year". That way what buyer's pay for would be much more closely connected to what they are actually getting.
  - fit2rule 8y ago
    None of those devices are being thrown away and many of them will be re-surfaced and cycled as 'classics' within a few years and used in mainstream music again. You can't say that about our computers or mobile phones, except among the hoarding/collectors scene.
  - pea 8y ago
    What really flummoxes me is how my Yamaha SY99, which is a digital FM synth from 1991 with 512kb of memory and, by modern standards, a tiny, tiny CPU, manages to do things that are really CPU intensive on a normal OS (like large plate reverb, tons of polyphony, on 12 tracks at a time) without ever lagging. The only real limit I've hit on it is loading in proper samples, versus waveforms, though this[1] insane project seems to have hacked memory expansion boards for the old SY/TG random. This is a piece of purely digital equipment that is now 27 years old, and yet my phone doesn't last for more than 2 years without feeling obsolete. Why is this? I've always wondered if these golden-age hardware FM synths provide any benefits over software (people talk about the super HQ DACs, etc., but I'm not sure if I buy that these components are better than modern commodity equipment?). The thing is, to my ear, the SY99/SY77 etc. do sound a lot better than e.g. Dexed or FM8, but is that just because Yamaha patented a bunch of the FM algos and architectures, and, with a retail price of £3,000 in 1991, they put more care into a complete end product than a VST FM developer realistically would? Or, can really low memory, low CPU, super purpose-built hardware somehow win against a modern OS? [1] https://www.sector101.co.uk/waveblade.html https://www.sector101.co.uk/waveblade.html
    - cat199 8y ago
      > manages to do things that are really CPU intensive on a normal OS Dedicated circuits. This isn't all in CPU - the CPU on these synths mainly sets parameters for the sound generating chips. not the same chips, but something like this probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_chip#Yamaha_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_chip#Yamaha_2
    - pooppaint 8y ago
      >
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Even if those synths stop working, it is usually some capacitor that has failed or some other easy-to-replace part and it's good to go.
- ken 8y ago
  Most fields don't throw their gadgets away like we do with computer hardware. I regularly with electrical equipment older than that.
MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
Its solid as in "it works and has aged well", but the spec has accumulated lots of cruft and is not straightforward at all. I once upgraded a Rust midi parser to learn Nom, thinking that midi should be an easy format. I was very wrong.
- sramsay 8y ago
  Yeah, I think you're describing a very common experience for developers hoping to work with MIDI. "Hey, a standardized format! How hard can it be? Oh . . ." Even without achieving all the things outlined above, just clearing away ambiguity in the spec would be a huge leap forward.
- TheRealPomax 8y ago
  It's the simplest spec I know of, except for the sysex part, which due to basically being "whatever a vendor wants it to be", you can basically ignore entirely. Anything that has to work with sysex is basically an independent parser that you write in additional to your MIDI parser. Getting it cleaned up, though, will be wonderful. It's about a decade late, but hey. Music industry. It moves at a speed parallel to us, just at a 10 year delay. Looking forward to machine learning synths in 2030!
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    I think the only thing I wish they'd done differently, considering the limitations of the time, is to disambiguate how you turn a note off. I don't know why you would release 1.0 of a spec with specifying that Note off and Note on with velocity 0 are interchangeable.
    - droithomme 8y ago
      It's because of running status. If your status byte doesn't change you don't have to retransmit it. This cuts the latency down by 1/3ms when you're just playing notes which is the most common case. You should only send note off messages (instead of note on velocity 0) when your instrument actually supports release velocity, which few do.
jdietrich 8y ago
We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced. The first major issue is simply the lack of bandwidth. The physical layer operates at 3125 bytes per second, which just isn't enough for anything more than a single instrument with relatively sparse control data. MIDI devices can ostensibly be daisy-chained, but that's a really dumb thing to do because you get horrible timing problems. Back when we still used a lot of hardware synthesisers, it was the norm to have a large multi-port MIDI interface connected to your computer, providing one interface per instrument. That still doesn't solve your problems if you have a multitimbral module with lots of polyphony - if you start sending control channel messages, the timing of your note on/off messages will fall apart. The second major issue is the lack of resolution. MIDI is an 8-bit standard, which is generally acceptable for velocity but grossly inadequate for most control channel messages. There are some pretty nasty workarounds being used to avoid zipper noise when you adjust a control parameter; this is most commonly an issue when sweeping a resonant filter. There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages, but they're non-standard aside from velocity and pitch bend. MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems. We're forced to use the crude bodge of sending a note on message immediately followed by a pitch bend message; MIDI doesn't support per-note pitch bend, so you can't have polyphony and microtimbrality on the same channel. This is a fairly niche issue in the west, but it's a showstopper in a lot of other musical traditions. OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration. The spec is very powerful, but it just isn't very nice to work with. It's exciting to see that the MMA have a number of big players involved with the development of MIDI 2.0. We've been talking about fixing MIDI for a long time, but it seems like there's finally the traction to get a new standard widely adopted.
- dbattaglia 8y ago
  > MIDI is an 8-bit standard And considering one of those bits is used for status, it’s effectively 7 bits worth of resolution (128 discrete values is... not great for anything but maybe western scale note pitch values).
gdubs 8y ago
When I started work on version 1 of Polychord for iPad (almost 10 years ago, wow!) MIDI wasn’t available yet on iOS as a public framework. I decided to use the MIDI format for the underlying synth I built, regardless. It made sense because it was already a solved problem, and was well-suited to a resource constrained environment. In the end it was maybe the most impactful decision I made, as MIDI flourished and Polychord found a niche as a controller. Inter-app MIDI became one of the first ways in which iOS apps could work together rather than being little islands unto themselves, which then led to Audiobus, which led Apple themselves to open the door to cross-app features on the platform. It may be a dated standard, but a standard nonetheless; and that’s valuable in ways that are hard to quantify. Hacking on top of MIDI is not always easy, but it can be gratifying. You also discover fun Easter eggs — like the names of defunct manufacturers buried in the data bytes of the spec.
PaulHoule 8y ago
As successful as MIDI is, I can't help but think that it has something to do with a disengagement from music from the public. If you listen to musicians who were big in the 1970s (say David Bowie or Billy Joel or CSNY) it seemed liked they banned guitars and drums and other real instruments and that everything was made with some kind of "music word processor" and pop music became glib and lifeless.
- jerf 8y ago
  I don't think it was at all MIDI's fault. It was going to happen with or without it. Unless you just of consider MIDI a touchstone of the general computerization of the industry.
  - danellis 8y ago
    It already was happening without it. Before MIDI, there was CV.
- kakarot 8y ago
  I don't see what the rise of popularity with electronic music has anything to do with the specific communication protocol used.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  And drums have never recovered.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    What do you mean? Are there not still plenty of rock bands with real drummers?
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  20 years ago plenty of people who should have known better complained about how crappy 'MIDI music' sounded. I liked to point out that MIDI doesn't make any sounds. It's a communications protocol. A Casio is not a Moog. Hollywood managed to work miracles with MIDI. Similarly, if you find modern music 'glib and lifeless', that's not the fault of the instruments. For some reason the audience hasn't chosen to support something better. And let's just say that a lot of producers like to loop the same sample endlessly, because .... (they can't play? they lzy bches?)

fit2rule 8y ago

Musicians don't throw instruments away like other markets throw their gadgets away. I have a room full of 30-year old synths that still work the same as they did the day I bought them, and they're still awesome - I will never 'upgrade'. They're instruments. It'd be great if the other realms of electronic gadgetry could accomplish the same degree of uptake as electronic musical instruments - however, the anti-patterns that make modern consumer gadgets so appealing to the people who market and sell them, are a smell to musicians who have very little patience for designed obsolescence. Musicians don't tolerate that much .. anyone attempting to induce it in a product intended for music-making will find that they won't get far in this industry.

stfwn 8y ago
Hm, I don't agree fully. There is zero hardware innovation for digital keyboards at least. Some old electronic instruments are 'vintage'; what makes a Moog is the vintage Moog sound, so yes, you can't upgrade from there. But most digital tools are not instruments in that sense and definitely have the corporate gadget-marketing schemes going on. - Yamaha's Motif XS has some sounds that were adopted as signature sounds for some subgenres of funk, soul and gospel, but these are just samples that the upgraded versions XF, MX, MOXF have as well for this reason, and I don't see anyone with the XS anymore. - Nord clearly limits the features, storage and processing power of each keyboard they release so that they can upgrade it slightly the following year (the latest 2018 flagship model has 480MB of sample memory vs. the preceding 2015 model's 380MB). - Korg rereleased the Kronos with an SSD instead of a HDD and marketed it as a new machine. You could open it up and DIY for 80 bucks and save yourself ~$1.5k+ upgrade costs. - Roland still slaps the Juno brand name on random iterations of digital instruments that just have an extra button for this or that function that could have been added with a software update if they wanted to. New digital keyboards these days are just software updates that model familiar sounds slightly better, packaged in "new" hardware. The $3.5k pricetag for flagship keyboards that have barely changed in size/shape/material for years is a clear sign. I wonder why no manufacturer has just come out and said "this is our flagship keyboard until 2030, buy it for $2k and subscribe to software updates for $10/month" or "new software verson at $100 every year". That way what buyer's pay for would be much more closely connected to what they are actually getting.
- fit2rule 8y ago
  None of those devices are being thrown away and many of them will be re-surfaced and cycled as 'classics' within a few years and used in mainstream music again. You can't say that about our computers or mobile phones, except among the hoarding/collectors scene.
- pea 8y ago
  What really flummoxes me is how my Yamaha SY99, which is a digital FM synth from 1991 with 512kb of memory and, by modern standards, a tiny, tiny CPU, manages to do things that are really CPU intensive on a normal OS (like large plate reverb, tons of polyphony, on 12 tracks at a time) without ever lagging. The only real limit I've hit on it is loading in proper samples, versus waveforms, though this[1] insane project seems to have hacked memory expansion boards for the old SY/TG random. This is a piece of purely digital equipment that is now 27 years old, and yet my phone doesn't last for more than 2 years without feeling obsolete. Why is this? I've always wondered if these golden-age hardware FM synths provide any benefits over software (people talk about the super HQ DACs, etc., but I'm not sure if I buy that these components are better than modern commodity equipment?). The thing is, to my ear, the SY99/SY77 etc. do sound a lot better than e.g. Dexed or FM8, but is that just because Yamaha patented a bunch of the FM algos and architectures, and, with a retail price of £3,000 in 1991, they put more care into a complete end product than a VST FM developer realistically would? Or, can really low memory, low CPU, super purpose-built hardware somehow win against a modern OS? [1] https://www.sector101.co.uk/waveblade.html https://www.sector101.co.uk/waveblade.html
  - cat199 8y ago
    > manages to do things that are really CPU intensive on a normal OS Dedicated circuits. This isn't all in CPU - the CPU on these synths mainly sets parameters for the sound generating chips. not the same chips, but something like this probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_chip#Yamaha_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_chip#Yamaha_2
  - pooppaint 8y ago
    >
sebazzz 8y ago
Even if those synths stop working, it is usually some capacitor that has failed or some other easy-to-replace part and it's good to go.
ken 8y ago
Most fields don't throw their gadgets away like we do with computer hardware. I regularly with electrical equipment older than that.

MrBuddyCasino 8y ago

Its solid as in "it works and has aged well", but the spec has accumulated lots of cruft and is not straightforward at all. I once upgraded a Rust midi parser to learn Nom, thinking that midi should be an easy format. I was very wrong.

sramsay 8y ago
Yeah, I think you're describing a very common experience for developers hoping to work with MIDI. "Hey, a standardized format! How hard can it be? Oh . . ." Even without achieving all the things outlined above, just clearing away ambiguity in the spec would be a huge leap forward.
TheRealPomax 8y ago
It's the simplest spec I know of, except for the sysex part, which due to basically being "whatever a vendor wants it to be", you can basically ignore entirely. Anything that has to work with sysex is basically an independent parser that you write in additional to your MIDI parser. Getting it cleaned up, though, will be wonderful. It's about a decade late, but hey. Music industry. It moves at a speed parallel to us, just at a 10 year delay. Looking forward to machine learning synths in 2030!
- boomlinde 8y ago
  I think the only thing I wish they'd done differently, considering the limitations of the time, is to disambiguate how you turn a note off. I don't know why you would release 1.0 of a spec with specifying that Note off and Note on with velocity 0 are interchangeable.
  - droithomme 8y ago
    It's because of running status. If your status byte doesn't change you don't have to retransmit it. This cuts the latency down by 1/3ms when you're just playing notes which is the most common case. You should only send note off messages (instead of note on velocity 0) when your instrument actually supports release velocity, which few do.

jdietrich 8y ago

We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced. The first major issue is simply the lack of bandwidth. The physical layer operates at 3125 bytes per second, which just isn't enough for anything more than a single instrument with relatively sparse control data. MIDI devices can ostensibly be daisy-chained, but that's a really dumb thing to do because you get horrible timing problems. Back when we still used a lot of hardware synthesisers, it was the norm to have a large multi-port MIDI interface connected to your computer, providing one interface per instrument. That still doesn't solve your problems if you have a multitimbral module with lots of polyphony - if you start sending control channel messages, the timing of your note on/off messages will fall apart. The second major issue is the lack of resolution. MIDI is an 8-bit standard, which is generally acceptable for velocity but grossly inadequate for most control channel messages. There are some pretty nasty workarounds being used to avoid zipper noise when you adjust a control parameter; this is most commonly an issue when sweeping a resonant filter. There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages, but they're non-standard aside from velocity and pitch bend. MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems. We're forced to use the crude bodge of sending a note on message immediately followed by a pitch bend message; MIDI doesn't support per-note pitch bend, so you can't have polyphony and microtimbrality on the same channel. This is a fairly niche issue in the west, but it's a showstopper in a lot of other musical traditions. OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration. The spec is very powerful, but it just isn't very nice to work with. It's exciting to see that the MMA have a number of big players involved with the development of MIDI 2.0. We've been talking about fixing MIDI for a long time, but it seems like there's finally the traction to get a new standard widely adopted.

dbattaglia 8y ago
> MIDI is an 8-bit standard And considering one of those bits is used for status, it’s effectively 7 bits worth of resolution (128 discrete values is... not great for anything but maybe western scale note pitch values).

gdubs 8y ago

When I started work on version 1 of Polychord for iPad (almost 10 years ago, wow!) MIDI wasn’t available yet on iOS as a public framework. I decided to use the MIDI format for the underlying synth I built, regardless. It made sense because it was already a solved problem, and was well-suited to a resource constrained environment. In the end it was maybe the most impactful decision I made, as MIDI flourished and Polychord found a niche as a controller. Inter-app MIDI became one of the first ways in which iOS apps could work together rather than being little islands unto themselves, which then led to Audiobus, which led Apple themselves to open the door to cross-app features on the platform. It may be a dated standard, but a standard nonetheless; and that’s valuable in ways that are hard to quantify. Hacking on top of MIDI is not always easy, but it can be gratifying. You also discover fun Easter eggs — like the names of defunct manufacturers buried in the data bytes of the spec.

PaulHoule 8y ago

As successful as MIDI is, I can't help but think that it has something to do with a disengagement from music from the public. If you listen to musicians who were big in the 1970s (say David Bowie or Billy Joel or CSNY) it seemed liked they banned guitars and drums and other real instruments and that everything was made with some kind of "music word processor" and pop music became glib and lifeless.

jerf 8y ago
I don't think it was at all MIDI's fault. It was going to happen with or without it. Unless you just of consider MIDI a touchstone of the general computerization of the industry.
- danellis 8y ago
  It already was happening without it. Before MIDI, there was CV.
kakarot 8y ago
I don't see what the rise of popularity with electronic music has anything to do with the specific communication protocol used.
JasonFruit 8y ago
And drums have never recovered.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  What do you mean? Are there not still plenty of rock bands with real drummers?
8bitsrule 8y ago
20 years ago plenty of people who should have known better complained about how crappy 'MIDI music' sounded. I liked to point out that MIDI doesn't make any sounds. It's a communications protocol. A Casio is not a Moog. Hollywood managed to work miracles with MIDI. Similarly, if you find modern music 'glib and lifeless', that's not the fault of the instruments. For some reason the audience hasn't chosen to support something better. And let's just say that a lot of producers like to loop the same sample endlessly, because .... (they can't play? they lzy bches?)