New mid specs--anyone know when these go into effect?

Hi Jake,

If you worry about the MIDI standard because of the Zenph links I gave, don't worry...

According to this :

http://www.paul-lehrman.com/insider/2005/12insider.html

the MIDI files were extended by using unused controller commands :

excerpt:

" The Disklaviers are MIDI instruments, but even with its sub-millisecond accuracy and 127 velocity and volume levels, MIDI can't handle everything the Disklavier is capable of. So Disklaviers use something Yamaha calls “high-resolution MIDI,” which Walker figured out uses non-registered parameter numbers — which are undefined MIDI controller commands — to carry the extra bits for the note commands. “An ordinary sequencer couldn't keep up with this,” he says, “because it would have no idea how to deal with these controllers.”

Because of all the extra data, the data stream becomes too heavy for an ordinary MIDI cable to carry without encountering timing problems. So Walker doesn't bother: “We communicate by loading files onto the piano's hard drive and their computer is connected directly to the piano mechanism. As far as we've been able to see, there is no limitation on how fast the computer can send data.”

This seems then to be limited to Yamaha's Disklavier.

Good thing. We all want the MIDI standard to have its 27th birthday unchanged...

This trick reminds me of the HDCD extension that my NAD CD player supports :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Defin...le_Digital

I don't think I'll worry about this! MIDI has been around for an incredibly long time, and is used on countless bits of gear. It would be insane to introduce incompatible extensions to the standards.

For one thing, I reckon 127 velocity levels is more than adequate, as long as you've got decent velocity curves in software/hardware for both the keyboard and the sound generator. If either are bad (say if the keyboard only outputs 50-100) then you might want more resolution to pull out the detail, but this is a reason to fix the hardware, and not the MIDI standard.

Anyway, the approach suggested by the link above for 10-bit velocity (ie 1024 levels), is to stick the 3 least significant bits in a spare controller and make them subdivide each of the standard levels into 8. So if some "hi-def" MIDI hardware sends velocity 64.25, a "lo-def" MIDI receiver would see 64. I bet nobody would notice the difference.

So we'll eventually be seeing an entirely new set of midi keyboards that do respond to these 1000+ layers? Hm...I wonder how current software will act. Somehow I doubt that it will be able to automatically adjust. To take advantage of new specs, developers will have to create entirely new versions, and users will have to buy both a new keyboard and a new version of the software or an upgrade?

I'm not sure what to think about the advantages. I can see that, with 24 bit or higher sampling and 1000+ layers, there could be an increase in realism.