From: "Tony Nelson" <tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
At 4:21 PM -0500 11/11/06, Gene Heskett wrote:
...
Yup, and its been a constant src of amazement to this old fart that when
the midi spec was setup, they used a serial port, thats fine, but when
they set the data rate at only 31,250 baud, ...
Consistently attrocious timeing, with the horns always 1/16 beat late
unless the actual output order of each instrument is scrambled in the
order output. That would make it sound a heck of a lot less mechanical.
And there isn't a heck of a lot that can be done until we put midi on an
optical circuit running at several megabytes/sec. Something like TOS
maybe?
Firewire. Many products already, plenty of speed, almost robust enough.
1/8 millisecond isoch cycle times; each cycle can contain packets from many
senders; each packet can contain lots of notes.
MIDI over Ethernet is something we did YEARS ago, back when 10 base 2
was a common network configuration. We did it on NT 3.51 or 4, I forget
which. We checked timing for latency jitter. We managed 1ms maybe 1.5ms
RMS jitter with that weak a network, SLOW machines, and all that. It is
MUCH better today. (And we don't have to give it all away just because
we link in as a user mode MIDI device driver.)
We sell these kinds of gadgets to a modest number of customers. It's
nice extra money to have.
{^_^}
