[gmpi] Re: Drilling down into MIDI->GMPI conversion

  • From: Matthew Xavier Mora <mxmora@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 12:05:00 -0700

At 1:50 PM -0400 6/22/04, Ron Kuper wrote: 

 >>>
Thats a plugin that processes MIDI. it is not a plugin controlled
directly by MIDI.
<<<

No, it processes *music*.  (At least the MFX delay does.)  When you
delay note events for artistic effect, you usually want to delay the
volume control that goes with it.


we don't care about plugins that emit MIDI via the host outputs.
<<<

It's a plugin that emits *music* into the *graph*.


[coming out of lurker mode]

All the fuss on the list got my attention and I find it hard to believe what the list seems to be suggesting. It's kind of funny that as you are talking about converting MIDI to GMPI events and expect this to work and be efficient, we are right now working on MIDI performance issues with our FireWire driver. We have MIDI test files that can bring tone modules, DAW apps and our driver to its knees on some lower performance machines. Now you are talking about converting MIDI into these big beautiful fully descriptive events and pass then around the graph. I think conversion implies a loss or an inefficiency that will be more of a detriment to a plugin,
than dealing with MIDI directly. And remember your plugin won't be the only plugin running you could have dozens or hundreds of plugins running. Especially in the case of software synths.

It's not like MIDI is a new concept or a big unknown, but we find so many things that can't seem to deal with plain ol' MIDI correctly so I'm concerned that you want to convert a known entity into an unknown entity and expect it to work "better".

I think it would be a mistake to have to make a plugin deal only with GMPI events instead of raw MIDI. Also I think someone should sit down and implement what you are arguing about and see the real impact of the conversion and if will actually work. As someone who spent the last few years of his life trying to implement a spec that was created without any real implementation, I can tell you that the spec designers missed a lot of things and did not connect all the dots. After all this time it was only recently did we get the spec changed so you could actually implement was the spec was intending a driver to do.

Sorry in advance if I missed the mark, or if this issue has already been dealt with as there are 730+ email messages just on MIDI, I didn't get a chance to read them all.

Thanks,

Matt





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