On 9/3/07, groovyshaman <groovyshaman@...> wrote:
Maybe your definition of agnostic is different than mine. So be it. Makes me wonder... ;)
I have a bad feeling about this integration of computer and analog equipment - it seems that no matter what path is chosen, parts of the interface part of the deal is going to be obsolete in a few years, and/or software and drivers will be hard/impossible to find, and meanwhile the analog bits of all this are still going to be working perfectly. Computer systems tend to go obsolete very quickly, even when supported by the largest of companies, which isn't the case this time. Anyone remember the cassette based patch storage system that shipped with the yamaha tx81z? That was a case where "someone" had to make a decision about what kind of hardware<>software interface to use. I also think about the serial port that was on the back of my old paia proteus II - while it came with some scant documention that was supposed to be useful to potential programmers, no software was ever actually written for it according to John Simonton
That said, I'd vote for ethernet cables - they're a fairly well established, widely supported protocol. You're still going to have hardware/software issues that might be supported for a little while, but unless there's major money behind it, I'd seriously doubt if that support would last long.
A question along these lines, as I don't know nuthin' about the programming side of this - is the ethernet plug on my macbook easily accessible to a programmer who wanted to write the kind of code involved in this kind of hardware<>software interface? Is it similarly accessible on say, a standard pc type box - would the code be fairly easily portable? Implementing this interface and then only having software that works on pc's (for example) would be unacceptable to me. Would usb be more practical from a programming point of view? Midi? I'd assume that midi would be the least desireable, as it's such a slow protocol, but I could be wrong.