Midi Merge Technique?

[Mikko Helin]

>From: Paul Perry <pfperry at melbpc.org.au>
>At 04:31 PM 21/01/00 +0200, you wrote:
>>
>>Another note found on MIDI.ORG, "Realtime message ONLY may
>>be interleaved with System Exclusive.". So that's it. So
>>when you write code you should allow rt messages go through
>>SYSEX, but not interleave with other MIDI messages. MTC
>>messages even though "realtime" belong to sysex category.
>>
>Mikko, when they say
> "Realtime message ONLY may
>>be interleaved with System Exclusive."
>
>I think this means "The ONLY thing that may be interleaved with
>System Exclusive is a Realtime Messsage".
>
>The sentence doesn't specify anythig about whether or not 
>Realtime Messages can be interleaved anywhere else.

Yes, I can see, they were talking about sysex messages and in that
context mentioned that only rt messages may be interleaved with them.

So the only safe way is to expect RT messages coming any time
and not change the running status. So the state machine or
program code has to handle these independently. I've once
programmed a MIDI sequencer for DOS, but then I didn't implement
MIDI clock sync at all, and used it just with external keyboard
(Kawai K1) which wasn't sending realtime messages at all.

How then should active sensing messages be handled, maybe that's
on MIDI specs?

=Mikko