[gmpi] Re: 3.15 MIDI
- From: Tim Hockin <thockin@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:26:53 -0700
On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 01:45:52PM +0100, Martijn Sipkema wrote:
> Excluding MIDI would be a big mistake IMHO. All existing hardware
> uses it and a lot of the arguments against MIDI are not valid.
You can't just throw that out there, and expect us to take it seriously
without some justification.
I see a lot fo limitations in MIDI, and unless you know something I don't,
they ARE valid arguments. So enlighten us. Justify your position,
please?
> You say that you want "better" musical semantics than MIDI. The example
> you give just has different semantics; note on/off commands are meant to
> communicate keys on an instrument being pressed/released and it wouldn't
> make sense to index keys using a floating point value.
Indexing on keys is, IMHO, a limitation. The semantics of the same "key"
being sent a note-on more than once are not well defined. Callign it a
"key" index makes that operation be nonsensical, when it is really not
nonsensical at all.
You really want to tell a soft instrument about voices, not keys. And
even then, the soft instrument may be set up in ways you can't know a
priori. Maybe it is set up to be mono - each ne voice kills the previous
voice. Maybe it is set up to not map it's sound to traditional 12-tone
"keys" at all. A proper upright bass (or any stringed instrument) does
not really have the notion of a key - it has an infinite number of
pitches, but only one voice ver string.
MIDI just does not map to some of these things. You can force it to map
by futzing with pitch-bend, but even that is not perfect. I want to be
able to control a number of parameters per-voice. I just can't do that in
MIDI without setting up a channel for each voice.
> could be supported using some other protocol than MIDI. That doesn't
> mean MIDI should no longer be supported.
Why put MIDI into every plugin? Why not let the hosts be *REALLY* good
at MIDI and let the plugins just not worry about it. Every plugin gets
simpler by that little bit.
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