[sdiy] OT: sequencing over the internet

[Glen]

At 09:27 AM 3/14/01 , Dan Gendreau wrote:

This topic makes me wonder if it would be practical to write some sort of
MIDI drivers which would send MIDI info over a LAN, instead of MIDI cables,
at higher speeds than standard MIDI? For example, I'm thinking of having
sequencer software on one computer and soft synths on the other computer/s.
It would also be interesting to be able to access any external synths
connected to the remote computer's traditional MIDI interface. That would
be sort of like sharing printers that are connected to traditional parallel
ports on the remote computers. Is it possible to use the local network to
replace the MIDI interconnecting cables, and thereby avoid some of the
latency and bandwidth problems of standard MIDI?

This should be similar to the original idea of connecting through the
internet, but it would offer much higher throughput than most people's
internet connection. For windows, I think it would be just a question of
writing "drivers" that sent and received the MIDI data through the LAN. The
sequencing apps and the synth apps would work as they always did, and the
MIDI-LAN idea would be totally transparent to such end-user apps. It should
be possible to simulate several MIDI "cables" over a single LAN cable.

I think Yamaha or Roland are working on something similar, but their
solution utilizes custom hardware installed on hardware synth modules, and
I think they use custom network interfaces. To implement my ideas, there
shouldn't be any need to develop new hardware for simple
computer--->computer transfers. I like the idea of using standard, existing
LAN hardware and software where possible.


Later,
Glen