10 ms·

In praise of MIDI

247 points by omnibrain 4y ago

ChadNauseam 4y ago
Maybe of interest: Midi 2.0 https://www.midi.org/midi-articles/details-about-midi-2-0-midi-ci-profiles-and-property-exchange https://www.midi.org/midi-articles/details-about-midi-2-0-mi...
bfrog 4y ago
MIDI is still an amazingly simple, yet useful encoding. To think its been around since 1982 is astounding. I'm excited to see what MIDI 2.0 really brings and if its truly worth the added complexity. The 1.0 encoding is incredibly simple and to have gone 40 years (and still going), with many many devices being compatible with the protocol, is something that should absolutely be celebrated. Here's to 2.0 being just as long lived and successful, presuming its just as simple but expands on the field sizes, timing improvements, and flexibility in terms of non-western music as it seems to promise.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- matchagaucho 4y ago
  Came here to note the article makes no reference to MIDI 2.0. "There’s no MIDI 1.1" That was both its strength and its weakness. It took 40 years of MIDI consortium bureaucracy to evolve and agree upon the MIDI 2.0 spec.
billyhoffman 4y ago
Fun fact: several computer games in the late 80s used MIDI to support cross computer multiplayer. At the time Ethernet/LAN cards on home PCs were rare, but if you played games you mostly likely had a sound card/MIDI card! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Crazy that I missed that. Neighbours had an Atari ST and a friend would sometimes come with his MOOG synthesizer and we'd hook it to the ST but we didn't know about MIDI hacks to play multiplayer games. Now by default these home computers often had two joystick ports and to be able to play I-don't-remember-which-game we hacked some additional dual-port thinggy on a little PCB we'd hook into the ST's parallel port. This allowed us to play four players at the same time, each with our own joystick, on a single ST / monitor.
- alar44 4y ago
  Very cool. Makes sense too. At it's heart, it's an event signaler. Doesn't necessarily have to be music based which is the case for lights and other stage production gadgets.
kazinator 4y ago
Some 12-15 years ago, every browser would play MIDI files readily. They were used as ring tones on phones. Seemingly overnight, that all vanished. I shared a .mid file with someone a few years ago (someone at Google!) and they were not able to play it.
- tleb_ 4y ago
  Playing a MIDI file isn't a straight forward task! To me, it feels akin to sharing an image without telling its colour space.
  - eweise 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean by colour space but you should be able to tell it the type of instrument to play.
  - brudgers 4y ago
    General MIDI solved a lot of (but not all) the colorspace issue. It came out in 1991 and is good enough in the way cover bands are good enough.
    - deckard1 4y ago
      when Sound Blaster came out with SoundFonts and the AWE32 they really made .MID files shine. Old MID files that sounded pretty bad on a previous Sound Blaster or AdLib suddenly sounded amazing. And you think, wouldn't it be cool if the .MID contained the SoundFont? And... you get .MOD files, which were unfortunately seen as this weird demo scene format but were quietly doing things the music industry had not gotten around to yet. It was MID that would sound identical on any machine you played it on (assuming said machine had PCM playback)
      - brudgers 4y ago
        The shortcoming, I think, was file size for the samples. I mean 2MB was about average RAM for a new home PC in 1996 and sampled sounds at 16bits x 44 kHz would eat that up pretty fast. That means putting them in ROM and that means compliant hardware or CDROM latency.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Not bad, but completely skips over the piano-centric nature of MIDI and the ways in which this has hobbled musical creativity for 4 decades (despite the rest of MIDI expanding it). The good parts of MIDI are ... OK, the bad parts are terrible. The best thing about it is really just about the only bit of technology the audio tech world ever managed to agree upon that was license free and at least adequate for some important tasks. Ever since MIDI, every audio tech company has been convinced that its technology was going to be the next MIDI, and that the licensing fees from it would the ticket to an island of their own. E.g. check the state of audio-over-IP. You can almost hear people saying "I mean, imagine how much [ EDIT: Roland ] & Sequential could have made if they had licensed this!"
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  Roland and Sequential. Otherwise, point well made.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > piano-centric nature of MIDI and the ways in which this has hobbled musical creativity for 4 decades How so? Synthesizers are mostly controlled by piano-like keyboards. At least, all the actually successful ones.
  - anthk 4y ago
    I was about to say exactly that. Synth music from the 70's and the 80's it's huge in variety, specially the Avant Garde one from Japan.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Synthesizers are musical instruments, which means they have a control part and a sound generating part. Because they are electronic, synthesizers can decouple these to a greater degree than acoustic instruments. That's why you can play any MIDI-controllable synth using a Yamaha EWI (a wind-driven controller) or a touchpad or a capacitative sensing service or a Haaken Continuum or or the pads on an Ableton Live surface or, yes, a MIDI keyboard. Pianos are a very specific type of instrument in that they have fixed pitches (compared with any non-fretted string instrument, the tuba or the human voice). MIDI has many assumptions built into it that are derived from the way pianos work, which means that using it in contexts where you want the sort of control not possible on a piano is ... challenging. One obvious example is playing something in a way closer to what you can do on a guitar: MIDI has no real way of representing the sorts of control a guitar player has access to. That said, people have tried, and the best systems are quite good, although they tend to subvert MIDI semantics and just use the syntax of the protocol.
quijoteuniv 4y ago
Are they finally using the 5 pins of the cable? Midi 1 uses only 3 !!!
- type0 4y ago
  No it doesn't have to, version 1 was very inefficient, MIDI 2 uses the same cable and is backward compatible, encoding is improved, cool thing it's bidirectional. edit: from midi wesite --> Can MIDI 2.0 provide more resolution? Yes, MIDI 1.0 messages are usually 7 bit (14 bit is possible by not widely implemented because there are only 128 CC messages). In MIDI 2.0 velocity is 16 bit. The 128 Control Change messages, 16,384 Registered Controllers, 16,384 Assignable Controllers, Poly and Channel Pressure, and Pitch Bend are all 32 bit resolution.
grubbs 4y ago
My mom was a pianist and purchased a Yamaha diskclavier in the late 90s. One summer I was able to download the Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack to a floppy disk in MIDI format. Was then able to insert the disk into the diskclavier unit and the piano proceeded to play FF7 songs with the keys and everything. My parents thought I was some genius at the time :)
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I have one here and it is an amazing machine. Mine is about a decade old, bought at a very steep discount compared to the new ones, but it is in mint condition, whoever owned it first hardly ever used it. My first experiment was to hack a disklavier mechanism into a rickety old grand piano, and while that worked it did not give me the recording capability and a good action so after two years of tinkering I bit the bullet and bought the real thing. Amazing to mess around with that, I wished there was more time in a day. I also use it to test my software on and it's always fun to see people that can play well realize the kind of tricks that you can pull with it. It's also a bit eerie, to see long dead pianists play from rolls converted to MIDI files for instance, it really has a 'ghost in the machine' kind of feeling.
btown 4y ago
The recent video on MuseScore 4 has a fascinating (though simplified) perspective on how limiting MIDI is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qct6LKbneKQ&t=21m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qct6LKbneKQ&t=21m35s MIDI's issues in a notation context are twofold: non-standardization of controls for e.g. choosing articulations for string instruments, and an inability to communicate future information if known to the MIDI producer - say, for instance, knowledge that this Note On event is the beginning of a phrase that will last for 2 measures, as known to notation software. There's a real way in which MIDI solved for communicating trigger events over the wire, but was not extensible enough to allow for further backwards-compatible standardization that would let it communicate music over the wire. By contrast, the web evolved from communicating hypertext to sending entire application environments and executable code over the same protocols. The web was born later, to be sure, but in an age where an Arduino can execute JavaScript, I wish we were looking to much more extensible modes of communication as inspiration for what can be done with interoperable musical devices.
- armadsen 4y ago
  I agree with you in general, but I think it's important to note that the web has evolved in a forwards incompatible manner. You can't hook up an older device/web browser to the modern web and have it work with modern web sites. In many cases (depending on how old) it doesn't even degrade gracefully. On the other hand, you can hook up a 40 year old MIDI keyboard to a brand new iPhone via MIDI and it just works.
  - brudgers 4y ago
    To be pedantic, a forty year old MIDI device will probably have a pretty poor MIDI implementation by the standards of five years later…e.g. the DX7’s MIDI is notoriously limited (and it is only 39 years old). But I get your point.
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      I see your comment has been down voted, likely due to pedantry, but I wanted to let you know I appreciated it. One of the things I love about this site is the tremendous depth of otherwise obscure knowledge.
Already__Taken 4y ago
Midi also laid the groundwork for firmata which I'm grateful for getting me into electronics. https://github.com/firmata/protocol https://github.com/firmata/protocol
- ilyt 4y ago
  I struggle to find use case? It seems to inherit MIDI flaws and...not be compatible with it aside from maybe making MIDI device that sees it do something funny ? Like, the MIDI format is pretty elegant and easy to decide but why inherit limitations of 14 bit numbers and continue using "sysex" as kludge to drive everything ? Keep the format of <command><channel> (really, <channel><command> is probably better for decoding but whatever) but then instead of the silliness of 7/14 bit encode rest of the parameters properly
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Demo of MIDI audio gear from the eighties hooked to an Apple ][e playing Ultima V... It's mindboggling to think that you could have been playing that game in 1988 with such a soundtrack (skip at 6:40 if you're impatient): https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk I certainly didn't have that great of a soundtrack when playing Ultima V back then on my my C64 (AFAIK there was no MIDI support in C64 games and no MIDI add-on for the C64? Although I may be wrong on that)
- buescher 4y ago
  Back in that era, '87 +/- 1, a friend loaned me a CZ-101 for a little while. We both had Atari STs, which had built-in MIDI ports, and many games supported MIDI out and specifically the CZ-101 (this was very pre-General-MIDI). It was amazing. Never got one for myself.
  - kid64 4y ago
    Amazing! Do you recall any titles that had CZ-101 support?
    - buescher 4y ago
      Not specifically - there are lists online and the games I remember playing a lot aren't on them, so my memory must have gone fuzzy over the last 35 years. Here's a neat example, though the video on the page uses the MT-32 for music: https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2019/06/19/atari-st-games-with-roland-mt-32-midi-support/ https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2019/06/19/atari-st-games-wi...
- joveian 4y ago
  My favorite bit of marketing ever is the Live from the Sierra Lounge casette from 1988 which is an advertisement for the Roland MT-32 and AdLib. The first side compares it to basic computer audio and side two is just music with several game themes played on the MT-32 (and maybe AdLib for some?). https://archive.org/details/audio_live-from-the-sierra-lounge/LSLSide2.flac https://archive.org/details/audio_live-from-the-sierra-loung...
SeanLuke 4y ago
MIDI having been at "version 1.0" for 40 years is kind of a fib. Sure, the MIDI association never changed the number, but MIDI has undergone numerous revisions since 1.0 was established, including: LSB+MSB CC values, NRPN and RPN, General MIDI definitions, MIDI Show Control, MIDI Machine Control, MIDI Timecode, MIDI Tuning Standard, three different iterations of MIDI file formats, MPE, and so on. Even the guidelines for the hardware layer have changed from isolated DIN-5 to include USB, Bluetooth, and other transports. Really the only thing that hasn't changed is the basic byte encoding. The current "1.0 Specification", circa 1995, is document version 4.2.
elihu 4y ago
> "The standard is 40 years old and good for another 40, it’s so perfectly suited to the task." That's true, if you consider the task at hand to be allowing any piano-like keyboard controller to connect to any synthesizer and just work. It starts to break down if you consider it as a protocol for general-purpose musical expression. No explicit support for any tuning other than 12-tone equal temperament. No support for unisons on a single channel. Some support for per-note expression, but there's not really a sane way to support volume swells that works in a predictable way across devices. I think it should be possible to improve upon MIDI and make something that's a lot more flexible without adding too much complexity. MPE is a pretty good temporary workaround, but it's not the kind of thing you'd do if you were designing for expressive instruments from the start.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I’m quite interested in expanding what can be done with digital and programmable music/accompaniment, but I’ve never knowingly sent MIDI data over a physical wire, only software interfaces. So, grain of salt… I think MIDI is very well suited to build on top of, without needing to change the spec. Most if not all of what you discuss can be built in software (and hardware! but it might need to be purpose built for some tasks, which is admittedly a weakness of the aging spec) with MIDI’s existing features. Importantly, I think that can be done without introducing ambiguities that would require end users to pierce the abstraction layer. (I say this as someone who works on projects rooted in a relatively younger but also old-by-today’s-standards spec, with very good abstractions built atop, but breaks down for certain use cases in ways that came up just today in my weekly check in.) Granted being such a small, low level target means it’s easy to get those abstractions wrong. But as someone might say of a house, it’s got good bones. A motivated person with the right tools and skills can do incredible things. I’m not sure that’s a compelling argument that MIDI objectively should remain unchanged for the better part of a century. But it’s compelling enough I’d scrutinize any proposal to revise for its thorough in-spec alternatives.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    I think the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol addresses some of the issues with MIDI 1.0, like higher resolution values, tunings beyond 12-tone equal temperament, etc., without the complexity of MIDI 2.0. > OSC's main features, compared to MIDI, include: > Open-ended, dynamic, URI-style symbolic naming scheme > Symbolic and high-resolution numeric data > Pattern matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message > High resolution time tags > "Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control
jacquesm 4y ago
MIDI is just as amazing as it is limiting. I have a DX-7 here built up from salvaged parts that talks to all of my more modern gear like it's perfectly normal. Try hooking up a computer peripheral from that era, say a Centronics printer or an MFM drive to a mobile phone and let me know how it goes.
stevehiehn 4y ago
Whenever I need to explain MIDI to someone who has no idea what it is I ask them if they know what a player piano is. If they say yes, I say: It's that, but for computers, they seem to understand.
geenew 4y ago
CEC (the HDMI Consumer Electronics Control interface) is satisfying, in a similar way. An ethernet for, more-or-less, video-based consumer electronics. Exploring it is a joy, if only because of its constraints and simplicity when compared with TCP/IP.
cainxinth 4y ago
Did anyone else collect MIDI files in the pre MP3 days? I don't know what happened to my collection, but I had everything: pop, classical, movie scores, etc. I loved how they managed to recreate intricate and grand things in a limited format.
- pjscott 4y ago
  Oh, definitely. Even after MP3 compression came along, MIDI and MOD files were just so much smaller and quicker to download over a modem at my baud rate.
  - pantulis 4y ago
    I collected them from FTP sites and still keep them (later on vanbasco.com made hoarding MIDIs unnecessary) One of my guilty pleasures is to get a well done MIDI file from that era and render it using my Kronos and Logic loaded with NI, Arturia stuff. It’s impressive how you can produce something that was basically inconceivable to the original MIDI author that was using perhaps a Gravis Ultrasound.
    - pantulis 4y ago
      Just in case someone is curious, from my archive this MIDI file is from Aug, 1994 (!!!) and renders like this: https://soundcloud.com/pantulis/swing-out-sister-breakout https://soundcloud.com/pantulis/swing-out-sister-breakout
      - cainxinth 4y ago
        That was awesome!
- noizejoy 4y ago
  > Did anyone else collect MIDI files in the pre MP3 days? Oh yes! And I still copy them over every time I migrate to a new music making computer. And play them back every few years for a good smile. I even spent quite a bit of money on commercially produced floppy disks of midi files containing arrangements of popular songs of the day. It enabled an early form of remixing those songs. This was quite a thing during its heyday and was quite interlinked with the MT-32 sound module by Roland, which also ended up spawning an entire subculture of classical music lovers transcribing countless classical (and thus public domain) pieces into MIDI and posting them on BBS systems. Some of the modern classical midi archives on the web are descendants of those BBS sharing communities and I'm assuming that numerous midi files on current websites are actually from those days (late 80s to early 90s). The eventual standard MIDI GM (for standardizing program change messages into specific instruments) and subsequent dialects like Roland's MIDI GS and Yamaha's MIDI XG standardizing control change messages for FX like reverb etc. all stem from those days. The MT32 and later Sound Canvas series modules and Yamaha's competing models like the FB-01 eventually ended up becoming incorporated into many PC sound cards. So many memories ...
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8bitsrule 4y ago
Anyone who might need a MIDI reference to get serious about its versatility? If so, you'll want to find a copy of 1996 book "Midi Files" by Rob Young. ISBN 978-0132624039. (2021 2nd ed. ISBN 9780130608635.) Starts with the easy stuff, well-written and organized, detailed, and thoroughly indexed. Complaining shouldn't be allowed by anyone who hasn't studied it. You can't know what it can't do until you know what it can do. Many critics just don't know. And can't be bothered about that computer junk. Meanwhile, many top producers in Hollywood produced top-grade filmscores with it. 32Kbits per second is about 3000 bytes or 1000 of MIDI's biggest commands per second. Even 100 notes per second leaves a lot of room for CCs, NRPs and other controllers. Oh, and a rest is the distance between a note-off and a note-on ... if you actually have to convert to notation.
ardel95 4y ago
My first home computer had a sound blaster 500 sound card (remember when computers needed sound cards?) which had built-in MIDI support. The thing that absolutely stood out about MIDI is the small file sizes and crystal clear sound quality. All it effectively needed to encode was the meta data about the instrument - it’s analogous to encoding sheet music into a file format! What a blast from the last.
underdeserver 4y ago
I was THERE. http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml
- rashidujang 4y ago
  WOW this site takes me back, hours upon hours of reading Computer Stupidities. Thanks for sharing.
bullen 4y ago
What MIDI lacks is a soundfont standard, kind of like SVG for audio.

247 points by omnibrain 4y ago

Maybe of interest: Midi 2.0 https://www.midi.org/midi-articles/details-about-midi-2-0-midi-ci-profiles-and-property-exchange https://www.midi.org/midi-articles/details-about-midi-2-0-mi...

bfrog 4y ago

MIDI is still an amazingly simple, yet useful encoding. To think its been around since 1982 is astounding. I'm excited to see what MIDI 2.0 really brings and if its truly worth the added complexity. The 1.0 encoding is incredibly simple and to have gone 40 years (and still going), with many many devices being compatible with the protocol, is something that should absolutely be celebrated. Here's to 2.0 being just as long lived and successful, presuming its just as simple but expands on the field sizes, timing improvements, and flexibility in terms of non-western music as it seems to promise.

deleted 4y ago
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matchagaucho 4y ago
Came here to note the article makes no reference to MIDI 2.0. "There’s no MIDI 1.1" That was both its strength and its weakness. It took 40 years of MIDI consortium bureaucracy to evolve and agree upon the MIDI 2.0 spec.

billyhoffman 4y ago

Fun fact: several computer games in the late 80s used MIDI to support cross computer multiplayer. At the time Ethernet/LAN cards on home PCs were rare, but if you played games you mostly likely had a sound card/MIDI card! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze

TacticalCoder 4y ago
Crazy that I missed that. Neighbours had an Atari ST and a friend would sometimes come with his MOOG synthesizer and we'd hook it to the ST but we didn't know about MIDI hacks to play multiplayer games. Now by default these home computers often had two joystick ports and to be able to play I-don't-remember-which-game we hacked some additional dual-port thinggy on a little PCB we'd hook into the ST's parallel port. This allowed us to play four players at the same time, each with our own joystick, on a single ST / monitor.
alar44 4y ago
Very cool. Makes sense too. At it's heart, it's an event signaler. Doesn't necessarily have to be music based which is the case for lights and other stage production gadgets.

kazinator 4y ago

Some 12-15 years ago, every browser would play MIDI files readily. They were used as ring tones on phones. Seemingly overnight, that all vanished. I shared a .mid file with someone a few years ago (someone at Google!) and they were not able to play it.

tleb_ 4y ago
Playing a MIDI file isn't a straight forward task! To me, it feels akin to sharing an image without telling its colour space.
- eweise 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean by colour space but you should be able to tell it the type of instrument to play.
- brudgers 4y ago
  General MIDI solved a lot of (but not all) the colorspace issue. It came out in 1991 and is good enough in the way cover bands are good enough.
  - deckard1 4y ago
    when Sound Blaster came out with SoundFonts and the AWE32 they really made .MID files shine. Old MID files that sounded pretty bad on a previous Sound Blaster or AdLib suddenly sounded amazing. And you think, wouldn't it be cool if the .MID contained the SoundFont? And... you get .MOD files, which were unfortunately seen as this weird demo scene format but were quietly doing things the music industry had not gotten around to yet. It was MID that would sound identical on any machine you played it on (assuming said machine had PCM playback)
    - brudgers 4y ago
      The shortcoming, I think, was file size for the samples. I mean 2MB was about average RAM for a new home PC in 1996 and sampled sounds at 16bits x 44 kHz would eat that up pretty fast. That means putting them in ROM and that means compliant hardware or CDROM latency.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Not bad, but completely skips over the piano-centric nature of MIDI and the ways in which this has hobbled musical creativity for 4 decades (despite the rest of MIDI expanding it). The good parts of MIDI are ... OK, the bad parts are terrible. The best thing about it is really just about the only bit of technology the audio tech world ever managed to agree upon that was license free and at least adequate for some important tasks. Ever since MIDI, every audio tech company has been convinced that its technology was going to be the next MIDI, and that the licensing fees from it would the ticket to an island of their own. E.g. check the state of audio-over-IP. You can almost hear people saying "I mean, imagine how much [ EDIT: Roland ] & Sequential could have made if they had licensed this!"

SeanLuke 4y ago
Roland and Sequential. Otherwise, point well made.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> piano-centric nature of MIDI and the ways in which this has hobbled musical creativity for 4 decades How so? Synthesizers are mostly controlled by piano-like keyboards. At least, all the actually successful ones.
- anthk 4y ago
  I was about to say exactly that. Synth music from the 70's and the 80's it's huge in variety, specially the Avant Garde one from Japan.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Synthesizers are musical instruments, which means they have a control part and a sound generating part. Because they are electronic, synthesizers can decouple these to a greater degree than acoustic instruments. That's why you can play any MIDI-controllable synth using a Yamaha EWI (a wind-driven controller) or a touchpad or a capacitative sensing service or a Haaken Continuum or or the pads on an Ableton Live surface or, yes, a MIDI keyboard. Pianos are a very specific type of instrument in that they have fixed pitches (compared with any non-fretted string instrument, the tuba or the human voice). MIDI has many assumptions built into it that are derived from the way pianos work, which means that using it in contexts where you want the sort of control not possible on a piano is ... challenging. One obvious example is playing something in a way closer to what you can do on a guitar: MIDI has no real way of representing the sorts of control a guitar player has access to. That said, people have tried, and the best systems are quite good, although they tend to subvert MIDI semantics and just use the syntax of the protocol.

quijoteuniv 4y ago

Are they finally using the 5 pins of the cable? Midi 1 uses only 3 !!!

type0 4y ago
No it doesn't have to, version 1 was very inefficient, MIDI 2 uses the same cable and is backward compatible, encoding is improved, cool thing it's bidirectional. edit: from midi wesite --> Can MIDI 2.0 provide more resolution? Yes, MIDI 1.0 messages are usually 7 bit (14 bit is possible by not widely implemented because there are only 128 CC messages). In MIDI 2.0 velocity is 16 bit. The 128 Control Change messages, 16,384 Registered Controllers, 16,384 Assignable Controllers, Poly and Channel Pressure, and Pitch Bend are all 32 bit resolution.

grubbs 4y ago

My mom was a pianist and purchased a Yamaha diskclavier in the late 90s. One summer I was able to download the Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack to a floppy disk in MIDI format. Was then able to insert the disk into the diskclavier unit and the piano proceeded to play FF7 songs with the keys and everything. My parents thought I was some genius at the time :)

jacquesm 4y ago
I have one here and it is an amazing machine. Mine is about a decade old, bought at a very steep discount compared to the new ones, but it is in mint condition, whoever owned it first hardly ever used it. My first experiment was to hack a disklavier mechanism into a rickety old grand piano, and while that worked it did not give me the recording capability and a good action so after two years of tinkering I bit the bullet and bought the real thing. Amazing to mess around with that, I wished there was more time in a day. I also use it to test my software on and it's always fun to see people that can play well realize the kind of tricks that you can pull with it. It's also a bit eerie, to see long dead pianists play from rolls converted to MIDI files for instance, it really has a 'ghost in the machine' kind of feeling.

btown 4y ago

The recent video on MuseScore 4 has a fascinating (though simplified) perspective on how limiting MIDI is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qct6LKbneKQ&t=21m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qct6LKbneKQ&t=21m35s MIDI's issues in a notation context are twofold: non-standardization of controls for e.g. choosing articulations for string instruments, and an inability to communicate future information if known to the MIDI producer - say, for instance, knowledge that this Note On event is the beginning of a phrase that will last for 2 measures, as known to notation software. There's a real way in which MIDI solved for communicating trigger events over the wire, but was not extensible enough to allow for further backwards-compatible standardization that would let it communicate music over the wire. By contrast, the web evolved from communicating hypertext to sending entire application environments and executable code over the same protocols. The web was born later, to be sure, but in an age where an Arduino can execute JavaScript, I wish we were looking to much more extensible modes of communication as inspiration for what can be done with interoperable musical devices.

armadsen 4y ago
I agree with you in general, but I think it's important to note that the web has evolved in a forwards incompatible manner. You can't hook up an older device/web browser to the modern web and have it work with modern web sites. In many cases (depending on how old) it doesn't even degrade gracefully. On the other hand, you can hook up a 40 year old MIDI keyboard to a brand new iPhone via MIDI and it just works.
- brudgers 4y ago
  To be pedantic, a forty year old MIDI device will probably have a pretty poor MIDI implementation by the standards of five years later…e.g. the DX7’s MIDI is notoriously limited (and it is only 39 years old). But I get your point.
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    I see your comment has been down voted, likely due to pedantry, but I wanted to let you know I appreciated it. One of the things I love about this site is the tremendous depth of otherwise obscure knowledge.

Already__Taken 4y ago

Midi also laid the groundwork for firmata which I'm grateful for getting me into electronics. https://github.com/firmata/protocol https://github.com/firmata/protocol

ilyt 4y ago
I struggle to find use case? It seems to inherit MIDI flaws and...not be compatible with it aside from maybe making MIDI device that sees it do something funny ? Like, the MIDI format is pretty elegant and easy to decide but why inherit limitations of 14 bit numbers and continue using "sysex" as kludge to drive everything ? Keep the format of <command><channel> (really, <channel><command> is probably better for decoding but whatever) but then instead of the silliness of 7/14 bit encode rest of the parameters properly

TacticalCoder 4y ago

Demo of MIDI audio gear from the eighties hooked to an Apple ][e playing Ultima V... It's mindboggling to think that you could have been playing that game in 1988 with such a soundtrack (skip at 6:40 if you're impatient): https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk https://youtu.be/aJMwspc-5wk I certainly didn't have that great of a soundtrack when playing Ultima V back then on my my C64 (AFAIK there was no MIDI support in C64 games and no MIDI add-on for the C64? Although I may be wrong on that)

buescher 4y ago
Back in that era, '87 +/- 1, a friend loaned me a CZ-101 for a little while. We both had Atari STs, which had built-in MIDI ports, and many games supported MIDI out and specifically the CZ-101 (this was very pre-General-MIDI). It was amazing. Never got one for myself.
- kid64 4y ago
  Amazing! Do you recall any titles that had CZ-101 support?
  - buescher 4y ago
    Not specifically - there are lists online and the games I remember playing a lot aren't on them, so my memory must have gone fuzzy over the last 35 years. Here's a neat example, though the video on the page uses the MT-32 for music: https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2019/06/19/atari-st-games-with-roland-mt-32-midi-support/ https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2019/06/19/atari-st-games-wi...
joveian 4y ago
My favorite bit of marketing ever is the Live from the Sierra Lounge casette from 1988 which is an advertisement for the Roland MT-32 and AdLib. The first side compares it to basic computer audio and side two is just music with several game themes played on the MT-32 (and maybe AdLib for some?). https://archive.org/details/audio_live-from-the-sierra-lounge/LSLSide2.flac https://archive.org/details/audio_live-from-the-sierra-loung...

SeanLuke 4y ago

MIDI having been at "version 1.0" for 40 years is kind of a fib. Sure, the MIDI association never changed the number, but MIDI has undergone numerous revisions since 1.0 was established, including: LSB+MSB CC values, NRPN and RPN, General MIDI definitions, MIDI Show Control, MIDI Machine Control, MIDI Timecode, MIDI Tuning Standard, three different iterations of MIDI file formats, MPE, and so on. Even the guidelines for the hardware layer have changed from isolated DIN-5 to include USB, Bluetooth, and other transports. Really the only thing that hasn't changed is the basic byte encoding. The current "1.0 Specification", circa 1995, is document version 4.2.

elihu 4y ago

> "The standard is 40 years old and good for another 40, it’s so perfectly suited to the task." That's true, if you consider the task at hand to be allowing any piano-like keyboard controller to connect to any synthesizer and just work. It starts to break down if you consider it as a protocol for general-purpose musical expression. No explicit support for any tuning other than 12-tone equal temperament. No support for unisons on a single channel. Some support for per-note expression, but there's not really a sane way to support volume swells that works in a predictable way across devices. I think it should be possible to improve upon MIDI and make something that's a lot more flexible without adding too much complexity. MPE is a pretty good temporary workaround, but it's not the kind of thing you'd do if you were designing for expressive instruments from the start.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
I’m quite interested in expanding what can be done with digital and programmable music/accompaniment, but I’ve never knowingly sent MIDI data over a physical wire, only software interfaces. So, grain of salt… I think MIDI is very well suited to build on top of, without needing to change the spec. Most if not all of what you discuss can be built in software (and hardware! but it might need to be purpose built for some tasks, which is admittedly a weakness of the aging spec) with MIDI’s existing features. Importantly, I think that can be done without introducing ambiguities that would require end users to pierce the abstraction layer. (I say this as someone who works on projects rooted in a relatively younger but also old-by-today’s-standards spec, with very good abstractions built atop, but breaks down for certain use cases in ways that came up just today in my weekly check in.) Granted being such a small, low level target means it’s easy to get those abstractions wrong. But as someone might say of a house, it’s got good bones. A motivated person with the right tools and skills can do incredible things. I’m not sure that’s a compelling argument that MIDI objectively should remain unchanged for the better part of a century. But it’s compelling enough I’d scrutinize any proposal to revise for its thorough in-spec alternatives.
- lioeters 4y ago
  I think the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol addresses some of the issues with MIDI 1.0, like higher resolution values, tunings beyond 12-tone equal temperament, etc., without the complexity of MIDI 2.0. > OSC's main features, compared to MIDI, include: > Open-ended, dynamic, URI-style symbolic naming scheme > Symbolic and high-resolution numeric data > Pattern matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message > High resolution time tags > "Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control

jacquesm 4y ago

MIDI is just as amazing as it is limiting. I have a DX-7 here built up from salvaged parts that talks to all of my more modern gear like it's perfectly normal. Try hooking up a computer peripheral from that era, say a Centronics printer or an MFM drive to a mobile phone and let me know how it goes.

stevehiehn 4y ago

Whenever I need to explain MIDI to someone who has no idea what it is I ask them if they know what a player piano is. If they say yes, I say: It's that, but for computers, they seem to understand.

geenew 4y ago

CEC (the HDMI Consumer Electronics Control interface) is satisfying, in a similar way. An ethernet for, more-or-less, video-based consumer electronics. Exploring it is a joy, if only because of its constraints and simplicity when compared with TCP/IP.

cainxinth 4y ago

Did anyone else collect MIDI files in the pre MP3 days? I don't know what happened to my collection, but I had everything: pop, classical, movie scores, etc. I loved how they managed to recreate intricate and grand things in a limited format.

pjscott 4y ago
Oh, definitely. Even after MP3 compression came along, MIDI and MOD files were just so much smaller and quicker to download over a modem at my baud rate.
- pantulis 4y ago
  I collected them from FTP sites and still keep them (later on vanbasco.com made hoarding MIDIs unnecessary) One of my guilty pleasures is to get a well done MIDI file from that era and render it using my Kronos and Logic loaded with NI, Arturia stuff. It’s impressive how you can produce something that was basically inconceivable to the original MIDI author that was using perhaps a Gravis Ultrasound.
  - pantulis 4y ago
    Just in case someone is curious, from my archive this MIDI file is from Aug, 1994 (!!!) and renders like this: https://soundcloud.com/pantulis/swing-out-sister-breakout https://soundcloud.com/pantulis/swing-out-sister-breakout
    - cainxinth 4y ago
      That was awesome!
noizejoy 4y ago
> Did anyone else collect MIDI files in the pre MP3 days? Oh yes! And I still copy them over every time I migrate to a new music making computer. And play them back every few years for a good smile. I even spent quite a bit of money on commercially produced floppy disks of midi files containing arrangements of popular songs of the day. It enabled an early form of remixing those songs. This was quite a thing during its heyday and was quite interlinked with the MT-32 sound module by Roland, which also ended up spawning an entire subculture of classical music lovers transcribing countless classical (and thus public domain) pieces into MIDI and posting them on BBS systems. Some of the modern classical midi archives on the web are descendants of those BBS sharing communities and I'm assuming that numerous midi files on current websites are actually from those days (late 80s to early 90s). The eventual standard MIDI GM (for standardizing program change messages into specific instruments) and subsequent dialects like Roland's MIDI GS and Yamaha's MIDI XG standardizing control change messages for FX like reverb etc. all stem from those days. The MT32 and later Sound Canvas series modules and Yamaha's competing models like the FB-01 eventually ended up becoming incorporated into many PC sound cards. So many memories ...

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8bitsrule 4y ago

Anyone who might need a MIDI reference to get serious about its versatility? If so, you'll want to find a copy of 1996 book "Midi Files" by Rob Young. ISBN 978-0132624039. (2021 2nd ed. ISBN 9780130608635.) Starts with the easy stuff, well-written and organized, detailed, and thoroughly indexed. Complaining shouldn't be allowed by anyone who hasn't studied it. You can't know what it can't do until you know what it can do. Many critics just don't know. And can't be bothered about that computer junk. Meanwhile, many top producers in Hollywood produced top-grade filmscores with it. 32Kbits per second is about 3000 bytes or 1000 of MIDI's biggest commands per second. Even 100 notes per second leaves a lot of room for CCs, NRPs and other controllers. Oh, and a rest is the distance between a note-off and a note-on ... if you actually have to convert to notation.

ardel95 4y ago

My first home computer had a sound blaster 500 sound card (remember when computers needed sound cards?) which had built-in MIDI support. The thing that absolutely stood out about MIDI is the small file sizes and crystal clear sound quality. All it effectively needed to encode was the meta data about the instrument - it’s analogous to encoding sheet music into a file format! What a blast from the last.

underdeserver 4y ago

I was THERE. http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml

rashidujang 4y ago
WOW this site takes me back, hours upon hours of reading Computer Stupidities. Thanks for sharing.

bullen 4y ago

What MIDI lacks is a soundfont standard, kind of like SVG for audio.