The guys at Roland are genius. I have a somewhat old Roland RD-150 digital keyboard. While searching online for the user manual, I found a 'firmware update' on the official site.
I was curious. My keyboard is pretty old school, it doesn't have USB or anything like that. I downloaded the firmware update and opened the zip file.
It contained a readme... and a .midi file. It sort of blew my mind. They were sending firmware updates over MIDI! You had to press a certain key combination on the keyboard and play back the MIDI file into the MIDI in, and the firmware update would be complete.
That's not Roland being genius, though. That's kind of literally one of the things sysex messages were added to the MIDI 1.0 spec. It's also why it's taking so effing long for webmidi to become a standard, because allowing sysex would mean your browser could in theory tell your midi device to brick itself.
Yep, when I did a little work for the Midifighter[1] controller, I used sysex to send configuration (but not firmware updates) to the device, to be stored in EEPROM. It was a nice and seamless mechanism.
I discovered something similar lately in the KORG Volca Sample - they use audio for data file transfer, like a modem. They even made their implementation free software (BSD-3): https://github.com/korginc/volcasample
This is also how all communication is handled between Fractal Audio Axe-FX units and PC/Mac software Axe-Edit. Everything is done over MIDI, and nearly everything within MIDI via SysEx messages. Parameters of FX blocks can be individually controlled with short specific SysEx messages targeted toward the FX block and then the specific parameter within combined with its new value to be set with a checksum to wrap it all up. MIDI's low bandwidth (3125 bytes/sec) explains why it's so slow to upgrade and also why there is such high latency in modifying parameters and syncing the Axe-Edit software with the Axe-FX hardware unit.
Semi-semi-related, but I have a Xerox Printer-Scanner and I tried to update it using my Mac: the official instructions said to use the terminal to send the firmware update to the printer through the printer spooler, like you would print a document. I don't know if that's standard for printing hardware but I found it quite weird, also.
Speaking of this, I was trying to reverse-engineer the operating system for the DSI Tempest because you can send its binary data as firmware updates over SysEx messages. So you have the binary source of the OS, but not the source code. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what processor it uses without opening the thing...
The MT-32 sound module(also a Roland creation) was the target device of a lot of PC games circa 1988-1992. The more sophisticated soundtracks would reprogram the built in patches, also using sysex for this operation. Not only that, they would put text messages on the MT-32's display!
A huge amount of vintage electronic music gear, from multiple manufacturers, receive firmware updates via MIDI. Keyboards, synths, even electronic drum systems. It is extremely common, though not so much anymore thanks to USB.
Fractal Audio does the same with their amazing Axe-FX guitar processor. All updates to firmware are supplied as MIDI file as a SYSEX data stream. I was amazed to see that they updated internal firmware the same way they uploaded patches, and even WAV form maps for Impulse Responses. Definitely a genius way to maximise the protocol.
I think it's quite astonishing how solid the MIDI standard feels -- it's embraced by the entire industry and even though it's nearly 40 years old, it has worked very well for many types of instruments and software that couldn't even have been imagined at the time.
We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced.
The first major issue is simply the lack of bandwidth. The physical layer operates at 3125 bytes per second, which just isn't enough for anything more than a single instrument with relatively sparse control data. MIDI devices can ostensibly be daisy-chained, but that's a really dumb thing to do because you get horrible timing problems. Back when we still used a lot of hardware synthesisers, it was the norm to have a large multi-port MIDI interface connected to your computer, providing one interface per instrument. That still doesn't solve your problems if you have a multitimbral module with lots of polyphony - if you start sending control channel messages, the timing of your note on/off messages will fall apart.
The second major issue is the lack of resolution. MIDI is an 8-bit standard, which is generally acceptable for velocity but grossly inadequate for most control channel messages. There are some pretty nasty workarounds being used to avoid zipper noise when you adjust a control parameter; this is most commonly an issue when sweeping a resonant filter. There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages, but they're non-standard aside from velocity and pitch bend.
MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems. We're forced to use the crude bodge of sending a note on message immediately followed by a pitch bend message; MIDI doesn't support per-note pitch bend, so you can't have polyphony and microtimbrality on the same channel. This is a fairly niche issue in the west, but it's a showstopper in a lot of other musical traditions.
OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration. The spec is very powerful, but it just isn't very nice to work with. It's exciting to see that the MMA have a number of big players involved with the development of MIDI 2.0. We've been talking about fixing MIDI for a long time, but it seems like there's finally the traction to get a new standard widely adopted.
> There are some pretty nasty workarounds being used to avoid zipper noise when you adjust a control parameter
Workarounds, sure, but I wouldn't call it a nasty hack to simply interpolate between the discrete MIDI steps.
> There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages
NRPN is part of the standard and allows 14-bit control messages, so no hacking required.
> MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems.
There's the MIDI Tuning Standard since 1992, so there is a standardized accommodation for other tuning systems, and a bunch of synthesizers that implement it. Just not part of the MIDI 1.0 standard itself.
> OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration.
IMO OSC probably lacks widespread support exactly because it doesn't specifically address most of these things. It's a protocol for sending timestamped and namespaced data over a network, and anything much more specific than that is just a matter of ad-hoc convention. It solves getting high precision data to devices in a timely manner, but it doesn't address the issue of getting a client to play a note.
In general I think that MIDI 1.0 just being tolerated is a great way to summarize the situation, and I'm glad that actual MIDI 2.0 implementations are seemingly around the corner.
"MIDI Polyphonic Expression" and is a new MIDI standard created by us, ROLI, Apple, Moog, Haken Audio, Bitwig and others for communicating over MIDI between MPE controllers ... The principal reason for MPE is to get around a limitation of MIDI: Pitch Bend and Control Change messages must apply to all notes on the channel. This prevents polyphonic pitch bends and polyphonic Y-axis control (which uses Control Change messages) over a single MIDI channel. MPE solves this problem by sending each note's messages on a separate MIDI channel, rotating through a defined block of channels. Here's a brief summary of MPE: http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/mpe.html
Today there seem to be work arounds, not that a new midi version would not work better, however.
Most midi controllers support 14 but resolution using msb and lsb transmission - iirc this is part of the general midi specification, not a hack.
I agree that there are plenty of things to improve on the old midi spec, but I think for a lot of people the issues are irrelevant - while physical midi is 31k, most people I encounter now use multiple soft synths in their DAWs, and aren't even aware of the original spec and speed of midi (unlike back in the day with multiple synths chained off a single midi output on an atari ST where it was definitely an issue).
I remember zipi, which promised similar useful changes and came to nothing - I think for the vast majority of people midi doesn't get in the way of their work.
The physical layer operates at 3125 bytes per second which just isn't enough for anything more than a single instrument
The typical MIDI 'instruction' requires 3 bytes. So, 1000 non-intense instructions per second. Not good enough for intense controller mods, but if the played 'instruments' do most of the work, that's over 80 ips (notes e.g.) for each of 12 voices. (Also that's 3125 bytes per MIDI input, of which you're welcome to use many.)
Perfectly adequate most of the time ... and one reason that the original, genius design lasted this long.
NOT to say that it isn't insanely great to hear this news.
And considering one of those bits is used for status, it’s effectively 7 bits worth of resolution (128 discrete values is... not great for anything but maybe western scale note pitch values).
I love MIDI, its pretty much a universal standard. Every device I need it on has it (my modular is the exception for sound sources), and just a standard 5 pin DIN socket that is easy to solder.
Yes, it could be better but I don’t just tolerate it.
> it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced
The probability this is true for any system in use (software, natural language, tax code, home appliance...) asymptotically approaches 1 with its age in years.
> We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced.
OK, what I'm going to say is not constructive, but, boy, how I hate this type of comments. Where were you 40 years ago? Why did you not prevent it from being terrible? What did you do to replace it with something better?
Yes, it may be "suboptimal" by the 2019 "standards", but back then, I'm pretty sure, people put a lot of thought in to it and tried to make it as good as possible. Just because it looks childish on the current hardware does not make it "pretty terrible".
EDIT: It's almost like complaining that 555 is absolute rubbish comparing to 8266 that can do sooo much more, and why just did they not come up with something better back then.
When I started work on version 1 of Polychord for iPad (almost 10 years ago, wow!) MIDI wasn’t available yet on iOS as a public framework. I decided to use the MIDI format for the underlying synth I built, regardless. It made sense because it was already a solved problem, and was well-suited to a resource constrained environment.
In the end it was maybe the most impactful decision I made, as MIDI flourished and Polychord found a niche as a controller. Inter-app MIDI became one of the first ways in which iOS apps could work together rather than being little islands unto themselves, which then led to Audiobus, which led Apple themselves to open the door to cross-app features on the platform.
It may be a dated standard, but a standard nonetheless; and that’s valuable in ways that are hard to quantify.
Hacking on top of MIDI is not always easy, but it can be gratifying. You also discover fun Easter eggs — like the names of defunct manufacturers buried in the data bytes of the spec.
Musicians don't throw instruments away like other markets throw their gadgets away. I have a room full of 30-year old synths that still work the same as they did the day I bought them, and they're still awesome - I will never 'upgrade'. They're instruments.
It'd be great if the other realms of electronic gadgetry could accomplish the same degree of uptake as electronic musical instruments - however, the anti-patterns that make modern consumer gadgets so appealing to the people who market and sell them, are a smell to musicians who have very little patience for designed obsolescence. Musicians don't tolerate that much .. anyone attempting to induce it in a product intended for music-making will find that they won't get far in this industry.
Hm, I don't agree fully. There is zero hardware innovation for digital keyboards at least. Some old electronic instruments are 'vintage'; what makes a Moog is the vintage Moog sound, so yes, you can't upgrade from there. But most digital tools are not instruments in that sense and definitely have the corporate gadget-marketing schemes going on.
- Yamaha's Motif XS has some sounds that were adopted as signature sounds for some subgenres of funk, soul and gospel, but these are just samples that the upgraded versions XF, MX, MOXF have as well for this reason, and I don't see anyone with the XS anymore.
- Nord clearly limits the features, storage and processing power of each keyboard they release so that they can upgrade it slightly the following year (the latest 2018 flagship model has 480MB of sample memory vs. the preceding 2015 model's 380MB).
- Korg rereleased the Kronos with an SSD instead of a HDD and marketed it as a new machine. You could open it up and DIY for 80 bucks and save yourself ~$1.5k+ upgrade costs.
- Roland still slaps the Juno brand name on random iterations of digital instruments that just have an extra button for this or that function that could have been added with a software update if they wanted to.
New digital keyboards these days are just software updates that model familiar sounds slightly better, packaged in "new" hardware. The $3.5k pricetag for flagship keyboards that have barely changed in size/shape/material for years is a clear sign. I wonder why no manufacturer has just come out and said "this is our flagship keyboard until 2030, buy it for $2k and subscribe to software updates for $10/month" or "new software verson at $100 every year". That way what buyer's pay for would be much more closely connected to what they are actually getting.
Its solid as in "it works and has aged well", but the spec has accumulated lots of cruft and is not straightforward at all. I once upgraded a Rust midi parser to learn Nom, thinking that midi should be an easy format. I was very wrong.
It's the simplest spec I know of, except for the sysex part, which due to basically being "whatever a vendor wants it to be", you can basically ignore entirely. Anything that has to work with sysex is basically an independent parser that you write in additional to your MIDI parser.
Getting it cleaned up, though, will be wonderful. It's about a decade late, but hey. Music industry. It moves at a speed parallel to us, just at a 10 year delay. Looking forward to machine learning synths in 2030!
Yeah, I think you're describing a very common experience for developers hoping to work with MIDI. "Hey, a standardized format! How hard can it be? Oh . . ."
Even without achieving all the things outlined above, just clearing away ambiguity in the spec would be a huge leap forward.
Are you sure that you aren't confusing MIDI with SMF? With MIDI my experience was that it was very simple to implement and understand the standard. It took me <100 lines of C. SMF on the other hand looks quite a bit messier.
As successful as MIDI is, I can't help but think that it has something to do with a disengagement from music from the public.
If you listen to musicians who were big in the 1970s (say David Bowie or Billy Joel or CSNY) it seemed liked they banned guitars and drums and other real instruments and that everything was made with some kind of "music word processor" and pop music became glib and lifeless.
20 years ago plenty of people who should have known better complained about how crappy 'MIDI music' sounded. I liked to point out that MIDI doesn't make any sounds. It's a communications protocol. A Casio is not a Moog. Hollywood managed to work miracles with MIDI.
Similarly, if you find modern music 'glib and lifeless', that's not the fault of the instruments. For some reason the audience hasn't chosen to support something better. And let's just say that a lot of producers like to loop the same sample endlessly, because .... (they can't play? they lzy bches?)
I don't think it was at all MIDI's fault. It was going to happen with or without it. Unless you just of consider MIDI a touchstone of the general computerization of the industry.
“The MIDI 2.0 initiative updates MIDI with auto-configuration, new DAW/web integrations, extended resolution, increased expressiveness, and tighter timing -- all while maintaining a high priority on backward compatibility. This major update of MIDI paves the way for a new generation of advanced interconnected MIDI devices, while still preserving interoperability with the millions of existing MIDI 1.0 devices. One of the core goals of the MIDI 2.0 initiative is to also enhance the MIDI 1.0 feature set whenever possible.”
I recently read the biography (for lack of a better term) of sequential circuits. Dave Smith(the founder who still makes awesome synthesizers today) was a primary stakeholder in pushing the standard though. What essentially happened was All companies had a data/sync standard for electronic instruments. Then Oberheim released a system that many manufacturers saw as a threat to their business. Dave Smith convinced Roland to just adopt something and that momentum of sequential and Roland would turn adoption in their favor. That pretty much worked. Iirc the midi association then made Tom Oberheim president.
I'm currently saving my pennies for a Prophet 6 synth from Dave Smith Instruments (which I believe has now been re-renamed back to Sequential Circuits). I grew up with the classic sound of the Prophet 5 through all the music I listened to in the 80s.
From memory, Yamaha, who owned the Sequential brand were magnanimous enough to give Dave back all his IP some years ago to allow him to build the next generation of synthesisers based on his old ones, and it looks like they have given him back his original company name now too!
I’m not OP, but I suspect it was “The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The Complete Story of Sequential Circuits,” for which Dave Smith wrote the foreword.
MIDI is great, and I am so thankful that they had the foresight to require a mandatory opto-coupler in the input to avoid ground loops of interconnected gear.
Even today, very few devices have a comparable insulation in their USB connection.
On my guitar pedalboard, I tried to be clever once and I hooked all of my digital pedals with a usb hub to a main connector. Horrible ground loops and digital noise was introduced. Does anyone make an electrically isolated usb hub?
Will it allow me to poll the state of the knobs on my keyboard? Many instruments have MIDI extensions to allow you to check the state of the controls, but having one built in to the language would be great, especially for WebMIDI.
Depending on what you'd consider a 'connector,' the headphone jack has quite a long lineage. I believe the 3.5mm headphone jack was originally created in the '50s. Of course, on the very distant planet that phone vendors live in, the headphone jack is not in active use, because people there were apparently absolutely begging for phones that were fractions of a millimeter thinner. In any case, if you count the larger variants, it's been around for a fair bit longer than that, even.
Interesting that you went with the 3.5mm jack, and not the 1/4" jack, which predate the 20th century and will be in use until analog electric signals become impossible, rather than being tied to whether or not "cabled portable audio devices" stay a thing or whether we give up on those.
Quarter inch jack has to be older than most, as it's pre-1900.
Still standard equipment on hi-fi, guitars, headsets and other uses. Even the screw on 1/4 to 3.5mm adaptor has become standard. Only smartphones decided to be awkward.
Connectors come in all ages, but it surely has to be the oldest digital interface that you might still occasionally find on new devices in the non-food section of a larger supermarket.
I suppose one could dispute "in active use", but D-sub connectors predate DIN connectors and are still in use today. I see them primarily on industrial equipment and, obviously, not on PCs much anymore. Given that MIDI is pretty specialized, too, I'd say that D-sub is at least as common, if not more so.
I think MIDI over USB is most common nowadays, especially for connecting with a computer. There is no lack of devices with the 5 pin DIN connector though. I recently bought a new keyboard and it has In and Out DIN connectors besides USB. The keyboard model was released in 2016, I think, so nothing vintage.
> The lack of adherence to the standards produced a thriving industry of breakout boxes, patch boxes, test equipment, books, and other aids for the connection of disparate equipment.
The value of a standard is also when nobody follows it :)
I want to believe this will get decent adoption in my lifetime. MIDI has so many historical limitations that have become ridiculous in a modern context, like only having 16 channels per bus or the very low control precision. These have lead to hacky solutions and compromises that often end up creating a poor experience for users.
I've worked on plugins that require per-note tuning and pitch bend, and the current best solution, MPE, is limiting. You're forced to use an entire MIDI bus to control a single instrument. This is a huge hack, and it means you can't create a MIDI plugin that controls multiple instruments.
Vendors are slow to adopt new standards in the audio world (as in many domains), and I hope this will be followed up with good diplomacy. We can learn from the non-adoption of Steinberg's VST3 standard as a path to avoid.
Steinberg is no longer granting licenses for VST2, so legally there can be no more new VST2 developers. But not all the hosts support VST3 yet and VST3 is over 10 years old. It's a giant pain in the ass.
They are trying to force it, but people just don't want it.
Readit News
The guys at Roland are genius. I have a somewhat old Roland RD-150 digital keyboard. While searching online for the user manual, I found a 'firmware update' on the official site.
I was curious. My keyboard is pretty old school, it doesn't have USB or anything like that. I downloaded the firmware update and opened the zip file.
It contained a readme... and a .midi file. It sort of blew my mind. They were sending firmware updates over MIDI! You had to press a certain key combination on the keyboard and play back the MIDI file into the MIDI in, and the firmware update would be complete.
True hackers.
[1] https://www.midifighter.com/ I made the first version of the configuration tool.
Though, CPU architecture is only part of the problem, identifying the actual SoC is easier when you open the device.
Deleted Comment
The first major issue is simply the lack of bandwidth. The physical layer operates at 3125 bytes per second, which just isn't enough for anything more than a single instrument with relatively sparse control data. MIDI devices can ostensibly be daisy-chained, but that's a really dumb thing to do because you get horrible timing problems. Back when we still used a lot of hardware synthesisers, it was the norm to have a large multi-port MIDI interface connected to your computer, providing one interface per instrument. That still doesn't solve your problems if you have a multitimbral module with lots of polyphony - if you start sending control channel messages, the timing of your note on/off messages will fall apart.
The second major issue is the lack of resolution. MIDI is an 8-bit standard, which is generally acceptable for velocity but grossly inadequate for most control channel messages. There are some pretty nasty workarounds being used to avoid zipper noise when you adjust a control parameter; this is most commonly an issue when sweeping a resonant filter. There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages, but they're non-standard aside from velocity and pitch bend.
MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems. We're forced to use the crude bodge of sending a note on message immediately followed by a pitch bend message; MIDI doesn't support per-note pitch bend, so you can't have polyphony and microtimbrality on the same channel. This is a fairly niche issue in the west, but it's a showstopper in a lot of other musical traditions.
OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration. The spec is very powerful, but it just isn't very nice to work with. It's exciting to see that the MMA have a number of big players involved with the development of MIDI 2.0. We've been talking about fixing MIDI for a long time, but it seems like there's finally the traction to get a new standard widely adopted.
Workarounds, sure, but I wouldn't call it a nasty hack to simply interpolate between the discrete MIDI steps.
> There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages
NRPN is part of the standard and allows 14-bit control messages, so no hacking required.
> MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems.
There's the MIDI Tuning Standard since 1992, so there is a standardized accommodation for other tuning systems, and a bunch of synthesizers that implement it. Just not part of the MIDI 1.0 standard itself.
> OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration.
IMO OSC probably lacks widespread support exactly because it doesn't specifically address most of these things. It's a protocol for sending timestamped and namespaced data over a network, and anything much more specific than that is just a matter of ad-hoc convention. It solves getting high precision data to devices in a timely manner, but it doesn't address the issue of getting a client to play a note.
In general I think that MIDI 1.0 just being tolerated is a great way to summarize the situation, and I'm glad that actual MIDI 2.0 implementations are seemingly around the corner.
"MIDI Polyphonic Expression" and is a new MIDI standard created by us, ROLI, Apple, Moog, Haken Audio, Bitwig and others for communicating over MIDI between MPE controllers ... The principal reason for MPE is to get around a limitation of MIDI: Pitch Bend and Control Change messages must apply to all notes on the channel. This prevents polyphonic pitch bends and polyphonic Y-axis control (which uses Control Change messages) over a single MIDI channel. MPE solves this problem by sending each note's messages on a separate MIDI channel, rotating through a defined block of channels. Here's a brief summary of MPE: http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/mpe.html
Today there seem to be work arounds, not that a new midi version would not work better, however.
I agree that there are plenty of things to improve on the old midi spec, but I think for a lot of people the issues are irrelevant - while physical midi is 31k, most people I encounter now use multiple soft synths in their DAWs, and aren't even aware of the original spec and speed of midi (unlike back in the day with multiple synths chained off a single midi output on an atari ST where it was definitely an issue).
I remember zipi, which promised similar useful changes and came to nothing - I think for the vast majority of people midi doesn't get in the way of their work.
Did mlan also promise similar improvements?
sounds like C
The typical MIDI 'instruction' requires 3 bytes. So, 1000 non-intense instructions per second. Not good enough for intense controller mods, but if the played 'instruments' do most of the work, that's over 80 ips (notes e.g.) for each of 12 voices. (Also that's 3125 bytes per MIDI input, of which you're welcome to use many.)
Perfectly adequate most of the time ... and one reason that the original, genius design lasted this long.
NOT to say that it isn't insanely great to hear this news.
And considering one of those bits is used for status, it’s effectively 7 bits worth of resolution (128 discrete values is... not great for anything but maybe western scale note pitch values).
Yes, it could be better but I don’t just tolerate it.
The probability this is true for any system in use (software, natural language, tax code, home appliance...) asymptotically approaches 1 with its age in years.
Sure, it's old and outdated, but it does the job.
OK, what I'm going to say is not constructive, but, boy, how I hate this type of comments. Where were you 40 years ago? Why did you not prevent it from being terrible? What did you do to replace it with something better?
Yes, it may be "suboptimal" by the 2019 "standards", but back then, I'm pretty sure, people put a lot of thought in to it and tried to make it as good as possible. Just because it looks childish on the current hardware does not make it "pretty terrible".
EDIT: It's almost like complaining that 555 is absolute rubbish comparing to 8266 that can do sooo much more, and why just did they not come up with something better back then.
In the end it was maybe the most impactful decision I made, as MIDI flourished and Polychord found a niche as a controller. Inter-app MIDI became one of the first ways in which iOS apps could work together rather than being little islands unto themselves, which then led to Audiobus, which led Apple themselves to open the door to cross-app features on the platform.
It may be a dated standard, but a standard nonetheless; and that’s valuable in ways that are hard to quantify.
Hacking on top of MIDI is not always easy, but it can be gratifying. You also discover fun Easter eggs — like the names of defunct manufacturers buried in the data bytes of the spec.
It'd be great if the other realms of electronic gadgetry could accomplish the same degree of uptake as electronic musical instruments - however, the anti-patterns that make modern consumer gadgets so appealing to the people who market and sell them, are a smell to musicians who have very little patience for designed obsolescence. Musicians don't tolerate that much .. anyone attempting to induce it in a product intended for music-making will find that they won't get far in this industry.
- Yamaha's Motif XS has some sounds that were adopted as signature sounds for some subgenres of funk, soul and gospel, but these are just samples that the upgraded versions XF, MX, MOXF have as well for this reason, and I don't see anyone with the XS anymore.
- Nord clearly limits the features, storage and processing power of each keyboard they release so that they can upgrade it slightly the following year (the latest 2018 flagship model has 480MB of sample memory vs. the preceding 2015 model's 380MB).
- Korg rereleased the Kronos with an SSD instead of a HDD and marketed it as a new machine. You could open it up and DIY for 80 bucks and save yourself ~$1.5k+ upgrade costs.
- Roland still slaps the Juno brand name on random iterations of digital instruments that just have an extra button for this or that function that could have been added with a software update if they wanted to.
New digital keyboards these days are just software updates that model familiar sounds slightly better, packaged in "new" hardware. The $3.5k pricetag for flagship keyboards that have barely changed in size/shape/material for years is a clear sign. I wonder why no manufacturer has just come out and said "this is our flagship keyboard until 2030, buy it for $2k and subscribe to software updates for $10/month" or "new software verson at $100 every year". That way what buyer's pay for would be much more closely connected to what they are actually getting.
Getting it cleaned up, though, will be wonderful. It's about a decade late, but hey. Music industry. It moves at a speed parallel to us, just at a 10 year delay. Looking forward to machine learning synths in 2030!
Even without achieving all the things outlined above, just clearing away ambiguity in the spec would be a huge leap forward.
If you listen to musicians who were big in the 1970s (say David Bowie or Billy Joel or CSNY) it seemed liked they banned guitars and drums and other real instruments and that everything was made with some kind of "music word processor" and pop music became glib and lifeless.
Similarly, if you find modern music 'glib and lifeless', that's not the fault of the instruments. For some reason the audience hasn't chosen to support something better. And let's just say that a lot of producers like to loop the same sample endlessly, because .... (they can't play? they lzy bches?)
“The MIDI 2.0 initiative updates MIDI with auto-configuration, new DAW/web integrations, extended resolution, increased expressiveness, and tighter timing -- all while maintaining a high priority on backward compatibility. This major update of MIDI paves the way for a new generation of advanced interconnected MIDI devices, while still preserving interoperability with the millions of existing MIDI 1.0 devices. One of the core goals of the MIDI 2.0 initiative is to also enhance the MIDI 1.0 feature set whenever possible.”
From memory, Yamaha, who owned the Sequential brand were magnanimous enough to give Dave back all his IP some years ago to allow him to build the next generation of synthesisers based on his old ones, and it looks like they have given him back his original company name now too!
In the wired realm, it doesn't get much better than the 3.5mm jack from a user convenience point of view.
Still standard equipment on hi-fi, guitars, headsets and other uses. Even the screw on 1/4 to 3.5mm adaptor has become standard. Only smartphones decided to be awkward.
For it to make sense I think you'd have to say specialised connectors.
Phono?
XLR (microphones) are quite old and still widely used.
Car "cigarette lighter" fittings, and lightbulb "Bayonet" fittings are pretty old too; not sure if the latter counts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XLR_connector
Also
> The lack of adherence to the standards produced a thriving industry of breakout boxes, patch boxes, test equipment, books, and other aids for the connection of disparate equipment.
The value of a standard is also when nobody follows it :)
Dead Comment
I've worked on plugins that require per-note tuning and pitch bend, and the current best solution, MPE, is limiting. You're forced to use an entire MIDI bus to control a single instrument. This is a huge hack, and it means you can't create a MIDI plugin that controls multiple instruments.
Vendors are slow to adopt new standards in the audio world (as in many domains), and I hope this will be followed up with good diplomacy. We can learn from the non-adoption of Steinberg's VST3 standard as a path to avoid.
They are trying to force it, but people just don't want it.