Nick Copeland wrote:
> 1980's-era idiocy of MIDI, in that it only has 127 steps in its CC's
(sheesh, not even a lousy byte!). Do you burn two controllers with
fine/coarse adjustments? If so, how do you determine the scale for fine
and/or coarse?
>
The choice to use 7 bit rather than 8 bit transmission in the original
spec was pragmatic. If 8 bit had been used it would have added more
than 10% of useless overhead to realtime messages (key on/off) and not
really have improved the efficiency of other controls - 127 steps are
too restrictive, but 256 would have been as well so double encoding
would still have been a requirement. At the time, this overhead was
quite a lot with a tranmission rate of just 31.25 Kb/s, and the use of
more complex encoding would have been an effort for the 8 bit processors
used in the early synths for which this was developed.
There was a lot less horsepower running around in those days. Especially
since the one processor also had to exercise real-time control over the
music hardware while sending, receiving and (I guess) passing through
MIDI events. The standard MIDI port is basically just a serial port, so
if 31.25Kb/s was the speed, that was pretty fast for those days.
I am curious - has there been any move to modernize the MIDI
connectivity standards to include USB or Ethernet?
--
David
gnome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
authenticity, honesty, community
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