Some time ago, RonKuper@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote...
I don't think it's prudent to toss aside MIDI as a communication mechanism.
Let me disagree. MIDI is lower in its level than an application-level software API.
MIDI specifies communication from the physical (current loop 20 mA) to the transport level, but no higher. Let me throw in an analogy with the protocol used to deliver this very message, SMTP. SMTP works on top of a connection-oriented transport protocol (usually TCP), and defines dialogue between mail delivery system and sender of a message, where the sender introduces itself to the mail server and transmits one or more specially formatted messages.
>HELLO dolly <OK >MAIL TO: john@xxxxxxx
On the other hand, software developers rarely if at all need to deal with inner workings of the protocol when sending e-mails. One uses an application-level protocol to send e-mail, such as MAPI or CDO on Windows systems:
Set newmsg = CreateObject ("CDO.NewMail")
newmsg.To = "john@xxxxxxx"
newmsg.Subject = "Make money fast!"
newmsg.Attachments.Add ....
...
newmsg.SendObviously, when defining a software protocol, we would want to deal with software interfaces, like the interface of the "CDO.NewMail" object, and not the details of wire communication, which most likely does not happen anyway.
Another question is whether we want to constrain the protocol to make it 100% MIDI-compatible. Personally, I do not think that they would make any sense in the context of a software protocol. Such limitations as 16 channels per port, 128 programs per bank, a mere handful of controllers acting per channel, and such "extensions" as SysEx and NRPN should go away, in my opinion. One should be able to control a Gimpy synth with MIDI, but Gimpy should not be limited in such a way as to allow full control of any object with MIDI.
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