How will MIDI 2.0 change music? (2020)
As long as it&#x27;s 100% backwards compatible, including the 5-pin DIN connectors, I&#x27;d be on board. No 5-pin, no game.<p>More on this below.<p>----------------------<p>USB midi is one of the worst thing that happened to MIDI. If I have a synth with USB midi and a controller with USB midi, I <i>can&#x27;t connect them to each other</i>, which is idiotic and frustrating.<p>The original MIDI spec had its drawbacks, but the biggest have been addressed by MPE.<p>As for latency, jitter, granularity — as a gigging musician and producer, I&#x27;ve never had any issue with it. It&#x27;s good enough. And most of the music you hear today is a reflection of that.<p>What&#x27;s not good, it&#x27;s that some manufacturers are ditching the 5-pin MIDI jack for USB or Bluetooth. Thanks, nobody asked. Same for losing the THRU port.<p>Because what musicians love is setting up their computer on stage while everyone is waiting, right?<p>Bidirectionality with MIDI can be achived by replacing the dual 5-pin MIDI with the mini-DIN (yes, the same connector the old PS&#x2F;2 mouse used). Yamaha Tenori-On and and Reface series do that (though again, nobody asked).<p>And the entire NRPN space of MIDI is unused because it&#x27;s unstandardized. So simply agreeing on how MIDI 1.0 should be used would address most of the problems that MIDI 2.0 claims to solve.<p>That&#x27;s what MPE does, by the way, and that&#x27;s why it has been silently becoming the de-facto standard.<p>The examples I see in promotional videos show a computer talking to MIDI 2.0 devices. We&#x27;ve had enough of that. What made MIDI 1.0 work is the simplicity of device-to-device connectivity, regardless of what the devices are (and whether one of them is a PC).<p>Think of this magic: if I have just ONE type of cable, I can connect ANY device to ANY OTHER device.<p>That means my Yamaha MX-88 I bought new last year can talk to Korg Poly-800 made before I was born.<p>I could have bought the cable in the 80s or yesterday, it&#x27;s the same cable.<p>What MIDI 1.0 gave people is less thinking about how to connect devices, and more about making music.<p>USB midi did the same thing for <i>devices connected to a computer</i>, at the expense of being usable in a setup that <i>does not have a computer</i>. That implicit assumption — that everything will involve a computer — was flawed.<p>WTF, I want to use my ROLI to play my  Yamaha — and I can&#x27;t, because ROLI is too &quot;modern&quot; to talk to <i>any</i> hardware synth made the same year.<p>I hope that MIDI 2.0 avoids this fuckery, but I can&#x27;t tell yet. Bidirectionality looks sus.<p>My litmus test is: if a device doesn&#x27;t come with a 5-pin MIDI jack while having space for it, it&#x27;s a gimmick (Teenage Engineering being an exception, because they make up for it with analog control: my pocket operators sync with my Korg Monologue via pulse, and Korg syncs with Yamaha over 5-pin MIDI).<p>And if Korg Volca could do it, so can pretty much everything else (hint: don&#x27;t put it on the side, put it on the front panel if you want that slim look).<p>MIDI 2.0 can be a huge success if you wouldn&#x27;t be able to tell a MIDI 2.0 device from a MIDI 1.0 at a glance; i.e. same connectors, same interoperability. Then it would be truly an upgrade, a 2.0, and not &quot;thing that works like MIDI in some cases, but have fun buying dongles to connect old equipment to new gear&quot;.<p>MPE works on that model; and connectors aside, any multitimbral device is MPE-compatible.