[sdiy] ADDA & MIDI over Ethernet/Firewire?

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Neil Johnson <nej22 at hermes.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] ADDA & MIDI over Ethernet/Firewire?
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 22:22:04 +0100 (BST)

Neil,

> > I just find that MIDI over Ethernet is set to become an IEEE standard.
> 
> Oh great, YAS syndrome strikes again (Yet Another Standard).  So now we
> have MIDI over MIDI, MIDI over IEEE-1394 (FireWire), MIDI over Ethernet,
> and MIDI over IEEE 802.11.
> 
> I'm waiting for MIDI over carrier pigeon (and I'm not joking...they've
> already got Ethernet over carrier pigeon, and they've even managed a PING
> so far, turn around time 3 hours):
> 
> 	http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1321176.stm

Technical correction... That's IP over avian carrier... lovely read for a
network guy. We have had discussions on IP over email, IP over earthquake and
IP over tsunami discussed on the IETF list, all great fun! ;O)

(I proposed the IP over earthquake BTW, and the "japanese gentleman" (Prof.
Ohto) proposed the extention of IP over tsunami, all in a side-kick of
discussing just how much you would be able to miss-use IP encoded over MIME,
in practice allowing for email-based or webaccess-based IP-tunnels, a real
nightmare for firewalling based security which was my point in that thread).

> As John says, it'll be interesting to see how they graft the desired QOS
> on top of TCP/IP.

Indeed. So far, no real succsess unless you run an empty or dedicated network.
Everything else is just urban myths until prooved.

> Mind you, people have been doing this for some time now, with their own
> adhoc lauer on top of TCP/IP.  At least, by standardising the method, it
> should encourage a broader sharing of MIDI jamming across multiple
> platforms and applications.

If you only run MIDI on the cord, then you have benefits in that you can have
cheap hardware which interface easilly with modern hardware and get cable
and interface infrastructure for free and much better speeds for SysEx-dumps.
Doing a mapping that works within that limitation is easy.

However, as soon as you mix in _ANYTHING_ else you are toast!

It is really supprising that people still want to do real-time stuff over
packets! It's a lost cause.

Cheers,
Magnus