[sdiy] Is MIDI Active Sense necessary?

[Tom Wiltshire]

+1 for putting active sense out of its misery.

It's a hang-over from a bygone age, not anything that we need now. I throw the bytes away in MIDI input code I've written, and I'd never send them.

T.

On 12 Feb 2013, at 14:26, "Colin f" <colin at colinfraser.com> wrote:

> 
>> All of my MIDI controllers filter out active sensing messages.
> 
> I ignore it too. It's more trouble than it's worth IMO.
> The only thing it will do for you is kill hung notes if a MIDI cable gets
> unplugged.
> It's no help if you simply have an error in a note number that means the
> note off gets missed.
> Active sense also caused me about the most baffling bug I ever saw.
> There was a hardware fault in a PIC about 10 years ago, that meant the first
> read of the USART rxreg after a new byte was received was valid, but
> subsequent reads would return the byte *before*.
> It was down to some fault in the double-buffer design.
> I might have realised what was happening a lot sooner, if active sense bytes
> from my master keyboard hadn't been pushing bytes through 300ms after I was
> expecting them.
> The result was a MIDI to CV convertor that was putting 300ms MIDI delay on
> every note on and off, for no apparent reason.
> 
> Cheers,
> Colin f
> 
> 
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