[sdiy] Release Velocity & Poly Aftertouch -- Too Much?

[Steve Ridley]

> It was only recently that I realized that most manufacturers were not 
> implementing release velocity. Why is this? Is it really because most 
> people seem to want a piano style action and find release velocity an alien 
> concept? Does it really somehow add to the cost of a keyboard? (I wouldn't 
> expect it to be a big factor.)

The only downside of release velocity is that it makes running
status less efficient.  My guess is that release velocity just got
dropped off in an attempt to speed up midi, and gradually got
forgotten.  It ends up in a catch 22 situation where keyboards
don't include it, so modules don't read it, so nobody bothers.

It's a very expressive feature - I like it controlling decay time
on string and pad sounds. 

> Most importantly: I want to know if it's simply expecting too much to 
> have a MIDI keyboard with both poly aftertouch AND release velocity. Is 
> that amount of data simply too much for a MIDI stream to handle? 

I'd expect the extra note off velocity data to be fairly trivial
compared with the poly aftertouch data.

> Sadly, I never saw any manufacturers really embrace all the possible 
> features of MIDI.

Yes.  


Steve


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