OVERRIDING M.I.D.I.

[Eli Brandt]

Llyal Gordon wrote:
> For my application, MIDI bandwidth is a problem. I want to use instruments
> on the market that communicate by MIDI- but the ways i want to control the
> instrument overload MIDI's abilities. I seem to ask too much from the
> machine. I don't think so.

What specifically are you trying to do?  Here are some possibilities:
        * Use CC's instead of sysex.  Sysex takes more bytes and is
          sometimes handled by particularly brain-dead code.
        * Make the synth do more of the work.  Have it smooth out
          stairsteps, for example, or generate a control sequence
          internally.
        * Screw MIDI: use a voltage-controlled synth.

Poking into memory registers is probably a lose.  Better to build your
own hardware than to spend your time reverse-engineering somebody
else's, IMHO.

> If i did this, are most MIDI equipped devices fast enough internally, so
> that by bypassing MIDI when communicating with the device, i would see a
> bandwidth improvement (hopefully in magnitudes)? 

MIDI is probably not eating nine tenths of the CPU, so I wouldn't
expect an order of magnitude from bypassing it.

-- 
   Eli Brandt
   eli+ at cs.cmu.edu