OVERRIDING M.I.D.I.

[Arnim X. Sauerbier]

Hi!

>I believe it failed largely because the Z in ZIPI stood for 'Zeta' ..
>no matter how open the standard, the replacement for MIDI will have to 
be
>an industry-wide effort, not just some one-vendor wanking.

Aah yes.  If we must have our vendors wanking, we want them all wanking 
in unison.  (sorry!)

>> The 'amateurs' are perfectly happy to hook-up their casio to their 
>> soundblaster MIDI port and find that it actually works.  
>
>Guilty as charged!  :)  (tho I don't have a casio)

No, your honor, this man is NOT guilty, he just claims to be!  He 
consciously acknowledges that MIDI has deficiencies, and he proposes 
improvements.  I ask you, is this the behavior of a man who is 
>>perfectly<< happy with the status quo? 

>I *like* this idea!  12Mb/s is plenty for continuous control, USB is
>inexpensive, it looks pretty much like it's going to be universal, it's
>auto-configuring.

DAMN, and I was gonna suggest USB in MY next message!   I'm a database 
janitor for a large computer hardware distributor, so I've been hearing 
about USB since July.  It will be a while before it's truly 'universal' 
in the PC world, but it's a very flexible, cheap serial bus for up to 127 
physical devices.  Plus at 12Mb/s, you can do fairly zippy sample dumps 
without resorting to SCSI...

Hmm.  And if/when USB becomes the PC standard, components will be dirt 
cheap...  There are technically slicker proposals (IEEE P1394, ACCESS), 
but USB has the Microsoft/Intel juggernaut behind it, so why even 
struggle?  "Resistance is futile.  You will be assimilated."