The death of MIDI

[elmuchoescadawg]

Does anyone else remember a few years back roland (i think) brought out a module that was MIDI via USB? About the same sort of time we started hearing about firewire and reading that in the future we would have single cable studios where all our outboard would be daisy chained to a host computer doing away with audio cables and looms.

Can annyone remember what this module was called??

 

[moose209]

Moose, I think I'll say it again - you're out of your mind dude.

I highly doubt MIDI will be gone anytime soon. It's got such a HUGE grasp in the industry it's not even funny. From feature film composers to big time metal producers....anybody who is anybody is using MIDI in some way, shape or form. For one man bands, it's a godsend with all of the available vitrual instruments these days including Drumkit From Hell Superior and HardCore Bass XP and extensive orchestra libraries like EWQL Orchestra and Sypmphonic which are used in the movie scoring world all the time. They all need MIDI to work. On the studio side of things you can use MIDI from a module hooked up to triggers to more efficiently trigger hits using Drumagog and the like rather than editing audio tracks so they aren't mistriggering. Also you can use the MIDI notes *to* edit the actual audio, instead of doing guesswork.

MIDI can be used for soooo many different things I find it nearly impossible to get rid of. I think Mr. Murphy said it best, there would have to be something immediately better than it before it would go away.

~e.a

I perhaps I am. In future I shall add question marks to questions
On further conversation as I understand it the trend by the big boys is for control surfaces and interfaces thats there next big thing and they are not going to include MIDI into these - so there will be provisions for MIDI but they wish to move away from MIDI. We as the consumer will not notice the change as as always it will seem like certain things will be impossible to do with older devices whereas new virtual instrument/interface controller will be able to provide these detailed levels of expression and high bit depth data transfer. Thats what we want apparently more ergonomic and hands on control over our software. I agree - to get to the point where consumers have access to hardware style software controllers might bring up the piss poor level of understanding and knowledge of entry level engineers and audio industry foot troopers. Maybe not - I am by no means a traditionalist - right tool for the job and my approach and flexibility is my mantra so I am hoping that this one piece of gear does all vision of controllers that are in mind dont leave us as baffled about how the building blocks of signal processing and recording work. How many of us know how an a/d converter works let alone a tape head? I am starting to think that in order to make informed decisions that give great results about of choice of equipment we must know how they fundamentally work. I've gone way OT here sorry.

Fact is the powers that be are wanting to move on so they can do bigger and badder things with there gear and get us to commit to them and create a captive market so to say. With an open source like MIDI and the data limitations it has they cannot do that.

That goes against my right tool/right job mentality as it'll probably mean that we'll end up with a load of compromises.

My argument is:
Inside a high end studio - how many uses are there for a MIDI system that has external components? Now the consumer market tends to follow the Professional market by desire rather than necessity? Or am I way off the mark. With the power that Logic affords many people in Europe and DP affords all those americans inside the box why would we need external devices for sound modules? The inherant linear stream of MIDI or more to the point limited bandwidth/depth will be redundant. USB now getting on a bit in terms of fashion and Firewire already control alot of peoples MIDI - the physiacl eliment of MIDI will be phased out and then how many people will notice that the software element has gone when its inside the box. I'll stop filling up the pages with Tesseract Banners now. I guess nobody see's the advantages of moving on - which is fine but more importantly why MIDI cannot compete with the designs of manufacturers for the next big fashion. Maybe they will fuck it up - we can always hope so - but companies like apple and digidesign now own a large part of the 'creative' industry, so I doubt it.