17 Oct
2006
17 Oct
'06
4:34 p.m.
The talk about RS-232C reminded me of another simple interface that's been
around for awhile--MIDI.
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I trip over them, they get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but since they're low-volume
items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
Cheers,
Chuck
17 Oct
17 Oct
4:39 p.m.
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The talk about RS-232C reminded me of another simple
interface that's been
around for awhile--MIDI.
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I trip over them, they get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but since they're low-volume
items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
This topic pops up now and then at http://www.midibox.org/. If you want
to homebrew your own solution, this is one of the better places to start.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
5 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
The talk about RS-232C reminded me of another simple
interface that's been
around for awhile--MIDI.
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I trip over them, they get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but since they're low-volume
items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
Don't see why you couldn't use licence-exempt 433MHz "keyfob"
transmitters and receivers for that.
Gordon.
5:10 p.m.
Chuck wrote....
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I trip
over them, they get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
Heard of a MIDI
patch-bay? :D I recently bought a USB Midisport 8x8/S. Love
it. At least it helps aggregate where the cables go to.
I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but
since they're low-volume
items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
From vague foggy probably incorrect memory - isn't the baud rate on midi
ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial ports? I wonder
if this is why it's not available commonly?
Jay West
5:15 p.m.
Jay West wrote:
Chuck wrote....
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I
trip over them, they
get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
Heard of a MIDI
patch-bay? :D I recently bought a USB Midisport 8x8/S.
Love it. At least it helps aggregate where the cables go to.
> I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but since they're
> low-volume
> items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
> experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup? From vague foggy probably incorrect memory - isn't
the baud rate on midi
ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial ports? I
wonder if this is why it's not available commonly?
31250 baud - unusual, but not that high. I once made a midi port out of
a normal serial port card by replacing the 14.odd MHz crystal with a
16MHz one.
Gordon.
18 Oct
18 Oct
2:35 a.m.
On 10/17/2006 at 10:15 PM Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
31250 baud - unusual, but not that high. I once made a
midi port out of
a normal serial port card by replacing the 14.odd MHz crystal with a
16MHz one.
Funny thing is when I was working at Durango on North First St. in San
Jose, Sequential Circuits was just a couple of tilt-ups up the block. One
of the technical writers was very interested in electronic music and kept
jabbering about MIDI. It looked like a serial port to me--and I wondered
why they had to invent something special running at an odd speed.
My memory is really fuzzy--was it the Atari ST that had the built-in-MIDI
port that gamers used tas a cheap network for multi-player games?
Cheers,
Chuck
2:47 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
My memory is really fuzzy--was it the Atari ST that
had the built-in-MIDI
port that gamers used tas a cheap network for multi-player games?
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
5:47 p.m.
At 01:35 AM 10/18/2006, Chuck Guzis wrote:
My memory is really fuzzy--was it the Atari ST that had
the built-in-MIDI
port that gamers used tas a cheap network for multi-player games?
Yes, the Atari had it built-in. The Amiga also handled MIDI speeds
and only needed minor adaption. The very first piece of hardware I had
for my Amiga was a MIDI dongle from Amiga Corp. circa '85 that plugged into
the serial port. It was a handmade, bare, uncased prototype they sent
me as a developer interested in making MIDI software.
At the time I was working for a computer music software company that had
made one of the first MIDI editing packages for DOS PCs. I think I still
have a couple Roland MIDI adapters for the PC from that time period.
Maybe a rare Roland prototype for the C-64, too.
- John
17 Oct
17 Oct
5:37 p.m.
On 10/17/2006 at 4:10 PM Jay West wrote:
From vague foggy probably incorrect memory - isn't
the baud rate on midi
ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial ports? I
wonder if this is why it's not available commonly?
It's high--but not ridiculously so--31.250 Kbit/sec--and no hardware
handshaking.
Cheers,
Chuck
5:44 p.m.
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Jay West wrote:
Chuck wrote....
Wired midi is a balanced current loop running at 19.2kbps. For obvious
reasons, low latency is extremely important and noise is intolerable.
These two are big reasons why wireless implementations are expensive.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I
trip over them, they get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
Heard of a MIDI
patch-bay? :D I recently bought a USB Midisport 8x8/S. Love
it. At least it helps aggregate where the cables go to.
I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors,
but since they're low-volume
items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
From vague foggy probably incorrect memory - isn't the baud rate on midi
ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial ports? I wonder
if this is why it's not available commonly?
6:06 p.m.
On 10/17/2006 at 2:44 PM David Griffith wrote:
Wired midi is a balanced current loop running at
19.2kbps. For obvious
reasons, low latency is extremely important and noise is intolerable.
These two are big reasons why wireless implementations are expensive.
Unbeknownst to me (and probably a lot of other people), there's been an
IEEE working group for MIDI-over-ethernet:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030625013841/www.plus24.com/ieee1639/
The industry midi.org seems to be at best, lukewarm about the whole affair:
http://www.midi.org/about-midi/ethernet.shtml
Maybe I'll wait a few more years...
Cheers,
Chuck
8:40 p.m.
> From vague foggy probably incorrect memory -
isn't the baud rate on
> midi ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial
> ports?
Wired midi is a balanced current loop running at
19.2kbps.
Not 19.2. It's high but not insanely high, somewhere in the low tens
of kbps I think. However, I'm quite sure it's not one of the usual
serial-port speeds, which rules out 19.2 kbaud.
It's also *opto-isolated* current loop.
For obvious reasons, low latency is extremely
important and noise is
intolerable.
(In typical - and even moderately atypical - applications, of course.)
I've never liked MIDI, because it has no way to send a bunch of
messages to set a bunch of notes up and then trigger them all at once.
You have to simply depend on its being fast enough that the ear can't
hear the delay....
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
9:36 p.m.
Someone wrote...
Yeah, I didn't think it was
19.2k....
Wired midi is
a balanced current loop running at 19.2kbps.
Not 19.2. It's high but not insanely high, somewhere in the low tens
of kbps I think. However, I'm quite sure it's not one of the usual
serial-port speeds, which rules out 19.2 kbaud. It's also *opto-isolated* current loop.
That
I remembered, from when I built my own 1-midi-in-8-midi-out box to plug
into my original creative labs soundblaster.
I've never liked MIDI, because it has no way to
send a bunch of
messages to set a bunch of notes up and then trigger them all at once.
You have to simply depend on its being fast enough that the ear can't
hear the delay....
Well, MIDI is really designed for real-time performance data,
not what you
describe. But what you are talking about isn't a fault of MIDI. It is a
fault of the midi instrument you are talking to. I can think of two ways to
accomplish what you mention.
1) If by "a bunch of notes" you mean a single chord, this is certainly
possible but it's a function of the instrument, not midi. For example, the
Oberheim Xk has a chord mode where you play a chord, then hit the chord
button which sets the notes in memory (and silences the chord). Then a
single keypress repeats that chord (and keys above/below play the chord
transposed the corresponding number of halfsteps). I do not know if the Xk
supports setting the notes in the chord via SysEx, but THAT is the way you
would do it. Set the chord via SysEX and then trigger via midi.
2) If by "a bunch of notes" you mean a sequence of notes and/or chords, sure
you can do this, if the midi device has a sequencer built in to it, many
synths with keyboard controllers do. They will take an external command via
SysEx or midi or several other methods to begin the playback sequence.
Blaming Midi for what you describe is somewhat like blaming TCP/IP for
communicating arithmetic precision errors the processor made to your telnet
session ;)
And with that, I will apologize for going so far off topic!
Jay West
10:50 p.m.
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, der Mouse wrote:
I should know better having built homebrewed MIDI gizmos. 38.8 or 32.x
aroundabouts.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
> From vague
foggy probably incorrect memory - isn't the baud rate on
> midi ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial
> ports?
Wired midi is a balanced current loop running at
19.2kbps.
Not 19.2. It's high but not insanely high, somewhere in the low tens
of kbps I think. However, I'm quite sure it's not one of the usual
serial-port speeds, which rules out 19.2 kbaud.
It's also *opto-isolated* current loop. 
1:40 p.m.
On Tuesday 17 October 2006 05:44 pm, David Griffith wrote:
Wired midi is a balanced current loop running at
19.2kbps.
Nope. It runs at 31.5K, if I'm remembering right, or pretty close to that.
(I worked on musical instrument stuff from around 1975 until we closed our
shop up in 1992, and attended several seminars on this stuff including two
trips out to SoCal for Yamaha PACE training.)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, dealiest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of spac, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
1:31 p.m.
On Tuesday 17 October 2006 05:10 pm, Jay West wrote:
If I'm remembering right it's 31.5K, which is not a standard serial rate at
all. Which means dedicated hardware, though it doesn't strike me as being
all that expensive hardware.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, dealiest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of spac, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
Chuck wrote....
I've seen some homebrew stuff like that out there on the web.
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I
trip over them, they
get tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
Heard of a MIDI patch-bay? :D I recently bought a USB Midisport 8x8/S. Love
it. At least it helps aggregate where the cables go to. I've seen
a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but since they're
low-volume items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any
ideas or experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
From vague foggy probably incorrect memory - isn't the baud rate on midi
ports/cables unusually high - far higher than typical serial ports? I
wonder if this is why it's not available commonly?
2:13 p.m.
[I]sn't
the baud rate on midi ports/cables unusually high - far
higher than typical serial ports?
If I'm remembering right it's 31.5K,
which is not a standard serial
rate at all. Which means dedicated hardware, though it doesn't
strike me as being all that expensive hardware.
4:07 p.m.
On 10/18/2006 at 1:31 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote:
If I'm remembering right it's 31.5K, which is
not a standard serial rate
at all. Which means dedicated hardware, though it doesn't strike me as
being all that expensive hardware.
31.25K, close enough. What I really like is the idea of is
MIDI-over-ethernet--that would let me use a conventional wireless hookup or
a simple ethernet cable. I found a Dutch outfit selling a general-purpose
ethernet box with various modules, but no prices or availability:
http://kissbox.nl
Cheers,
Chuck
8:50 p.m.
On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
If I'm remembering right it's 31.5K, which is
not a standard serial rate at
all. Which means dedicated hardware, though it doesn't strike me as being
all that expensive hardware.
If by "dedicated hardware", you mean an inexpensive microcontroller, then
yes. Please take a look at http://www.midibox.org/. Documented there are
all sorts of fun things one can do with MIDI and microcontrollers. MIDI
can be used as a quick, easy, and cheap way to wire up and control nearly
anything, not just synthesizers.
The infamous beer advert from last December with the house lights synced
with music is easily doable with midibox modules.
Note: My only associations with midibox.org are that I've built the stuff
described and enjoy it. Don't discount me because I misremembered midi's
speed.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
8:58 p.m.
David wrote....
Don't discount me because I misremembered
midi's speed.
David, you have a freepass in my book - because of your wonderful constant
reminder about not top-posting. As follows:
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
The only thing more annoying than top-posting is not top-posting but also
neglecting to trim the replies to just the germane info ;)
Jay
19 Oct
19 Oct
3:51 a.m.
Jay West wrote:
David wrote....
... when you receive a daily digest
Gordon
Don't discount me because I misremembered
midi's speed.
David, you have a freepass in my book - because of your wonderful
constant reminder about not top-posting. As follows:
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
The only thing more annoying than top-posting is not top-posting but
also neglecting to trim the replies to just the germane info ;)
18 Oct
18 Oct
1:28 p.m.
On Tuesday 17 October 2006 04:34 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The talk about RS-232C reminded me of another simple
interface that's been
around for awhile--MIDI.
I hate MIDI cables--I mean I REALLY hate them. I trip over them, they get
tangled up in my chair and I'm afraid the dog will eat them.
I've seen a couple of wireless MIDI adaptors, but since they're low-volume
items, they're freakishly expensive. Does anyone have any ideas or
experience with a low-budget wireless MIDI setup?
I haven't seen anything out there, but since the interface is to optical-type
parts anyhow, would it be reasonable to use IR LEDs and such like you'd use
for a remote control?
I guess directionality and distance would be the determining factors there.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, dealiest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of spac, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
6491
days inactive
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22 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
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cclist＠sydex.com -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
gordon＠gjcp.net -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
jwest＠classiccmp.org -
mouse＠Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA -
rtellason＠verizon.net -
trixter＠oldskool.org