[sdiy] MIDI HD

[Martin Klang]

On 21 Jan 2013, at 19:01, Neil Johnson wrote:

> On 21/01/2013 17:37, Marc Nostromo [M-.-n] wrote:
>> Yeah but there's only one pitch bend per midi channel. So it doesn't
>> really fit 'precision controller' in a wide sense.
> 
> Perhaps not, but there are thirty-two continuous controllers per channel that support 14-bit values.  How many do you need?
> 
> And since they support updates through two messages (one for the higher 7 bits and one for the lower 7 bits) I think you can actually get quite a decent update rate as you only need to send the upper bits when the lower bits over/underflow.

How do you imagine this working on the receiving side?
Should the device wait to see if the second message arrives, thereby introducing latency?

Or update immediately, causing skipping which might well be worse than the stepping it is meant to cure.
(if you don't believe me, consider a transition from 0x80 to 0x7f - it would first skip to either 0x00 or 0xff depending on which byte you sent first)

I'm not aware of this sort of solution ever being implemented. Anyone else?

NRPN's look good on paper, but are a pain to work with.
As has been pointed out there are very few examples out there of devices that support 14 bit resolution controllers.

And it's been 30 years!
Most working solutions seem to focus on filtering or interpolation to reduce the audible effects, with varying degrees of success.

MIDI was, and still is, great for one specific use case: how to connect a piano style keyboard to a sound generator.

For most other things it's just not very good: wind instruments, strings, percussion (it actually matters where and how you hit a surface to the sound it makes).
You only have to listen to a GM recording to appreciate that.

Unfortunately I think that the protocol has had a limiting effect on innovation, at least in the controller space.
After all, what's the point of making an amazing new controller if it doesn't sound any good with existing midi gear?

Still, I love midi. It is simple, it is effective, it mostly works, and I can get an Arduino to speak it with a few lines of code and a resistor.
But oh how nice it would be to have hundreds, nay thousands! of hardware devices that all speak OSC!

/m