[gmpi] Re: MIDI: Proposed Requirements (wrap up try #1)
- From: Marc Poirier <fipnid@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 13:10:40 -0700 (PDT)
Hello folks. This is a statement from all of us at Smartelectronix.
Someone mentioned this debate on our mailing list, and we found that we
all agreed on what we thought should happen, so we decided to make a
collective statement.
One first little note: this message may be a bit out of context, not sure
(please read the message's postscript for an explanation).
We really hope that the GMPI API requires support of the GMPI musical
events and does not provide any direct support for MIDI events. The only
place where GMPI should have anything to do with MIDI is that it should
provide some easy functions for converting MIDI events to GMPI musical
events for a host to feed to a plugin. But the plugins themselves should
only be dealing with GMPI musical events.
MIDI has pretty much no usefulness in software. The capabilities of
software are so far beyond what MIDI has to offer. The only usefulness of
MIDI is that some hardware can generate or receive no types of data other
than MIDI, and hence there is a need to be able to use MIDI data as a
control source or destination when communicating with some hardware
external to a computer. Those situations do need to be handled, but it is
only the host software that needs to reckon with this, so the plugin can
easily be shielded from this and live only in a land populated with
nothing other than enhanced, enchanted GMPI musical events.
There's also a more "real-world" reason why we make this recommendation,
which is that it's obvious that GMPI musical events simply are not going
to catch on if MIDI is directly supported throughout GMPI and GMPI musical
events are optional. Developers just won't bother to embrace the better
API. With existing codebases doing MIDI parsing, it's too easy not to.
And users will lose out. Users are tired of all of the limitations of
MIDI, and they've way outlived their usefulness in the software landscape
that we live in now.
Just look at Audio Units. The AU API does include an extended musical
event API, and is anyone making use of it? Not that we have seen. This
is because plain MIDI is also directly supported in AU. And so the nice
work that was done to make an extended musical event API has been for
nothing, because developers just take the shortcut of supporting only the
direct MIDI stuff in AU. We just want to emphasize this some more: WE
ARE SEEING RIGHT NOW THAT THIS IS A MISTAKE. There's no need to
hypothesize in the abstract about this; we've seen already that direct
MIDI support is a mistake. Isn't one of the main purposes of GMPI
supposed to be to learn from the lessons of all of the previous plugin
APIs? If GMPI supports MIDI directly, then GMPI will really be failing on
that point.
Sincerely,
Marc Poirier & Tom Murphy 7 (Destroy FX)
Koen Tanghe
Magnus Jonsson
Duncan Fewkes (Dunk)
Bram de Jong (musicdsp.org)
Paul Kellett (mda)
Andreas Schnetzler (Ioplong)
Antti Huovilainen
Remy Muller (mdsp)
Dougall Irving (DMI)
Alexander Kritov
Rob Conde (Jaha)
Jason Soares
http://smartelectronix.com/
*** the next paragraph is just Marc (who mostly wrote the statement): ***
P.S. - Let me just say that the above may be coming all out of context
from the current discussion. I have no idea where the discussion stands
now because the volume of emails is just so beyond out of hand. I dropped
out of this effort a long time ago because of this problem, and before
doing that, I brought up this issue at least a couple of times, but
unfortunately no one ever took it seriously. But I'll just say it one
more time: I really think that a firm cap on messages per day should be
put into effect. The ridiculous volume of posting does necessarily make
the process very, very exclusive, limited only to the very small
percentage of interested individuals who can actually keep up with that
many emails per day. How many is "that many?" At the worse I've seen, in
2 cases where I was interested in a new topic and tried to join back in, I
found that, in the course of 2 or 3 days, I had received over 500 new
messages. Then in each case, I just said, "forget it." So I just want to
emphasize again that I think a cap on volume is crucial, and I say that as
a pretext for explaining why this message may be out of context, because
there's just absolutely no way that I can catch up on the email discussion
at its current pace.
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