The future of midi?

The Lounge General Discussion
1

A general philosophical statement related to elektron gear.

I am programming my Arturia Beatstep for both the AR and A4 and seem to get the grid on it. I really like programming the AR and A4 which provides lots of possibilities useful to me, like scene, performance knobs, program changes. The beatstep really opens up the possibilities.

But at certain level the amount data which can be transferred is limited. I experienced sometimes that my rytm stops/hangs when I am sending too much midi data. I guess its has something to do with the midi transmission and hardware limitations.

At the same time I was wondering and thinking “out of the box” and imagined how it would be if there was unlimited data transfer to program your musical set-up. You could create a musical formula to drive this gear completely crazy. Similar to what we are doing now with our old analog gear, for example the 303.

But I would like to think maybe 20 years from now. If that is even possible. I do not know what the exact limiting factor is as I am not an electrical engineer. But maybe it would be very expensive. Hopefully they can make it cheap with some new material. Then everybody can enjoy a rytm and analog four combo.

Cheers.

2

I believe the HD protocol is designed to get around all of those limitations.

3

Possible to do it now, the problem is that no one can agree on a standard, as all proponents are pushing there own agenda, then you need to factor in that you have a well documened, well understood, tried and tested solution that covers 30 years worth of instruments.

Midi is one of the most amazing musical inventions ever, and is really quire mindblowing when you think about it.

4

But it’s eroded with each device that (e.g.) provides adapters in order to talk to a real MIDI cable, by each device without a MIDI thru, shaving costs to the minimum, and by an increasing believe that a USB socket is just as good… sigh… MIDI is a great protocol but a serial one. There are plenty of ways it could be made better and remain backwards-compatible. There have even been a number of workable models proposed but none so far have stuck It’s like 1983 can’t happen again for some reason…