On Sun, 2006-11-12 at 17:28 +0100, Pieter Palmers wrote: [regarding midi over firewire]
> Note that this is already implemented in FreeBob. There is nothing > preventing us from setting up a (random number here)-channel MIDI link > over Firewire between one or more devices. > > A major issue however is discovering the devices and negotiating a > common stream format. This is not specified by the MMA, this spec only > describes the actual transfer of the MIDI bytes. > Pieter, I am not sure that I follow you correctly here. Using bad car-anology: Is this like as if you have already build "The Golden Gate Bridge", but there are still no "Highways" connecting to it? That there is a sinc to throw the bytes into but no way for alsa to know about it? In other words; is a device like M-Audio's 4ch audio in/out + 3 octave keyboard useful as a performance instrument under Linux, or will the keyboard be dead? > Another showstopper is that every sender will need his own firewire > isochronous channel to send its data on, so that limits the number of > devices to 16. Keep in mind that the Firewire bus is one single domain > (for the Isochronous traffic), i.e. everybody sees everything. > Uhmm yes, but as I read from the paper, the midi transfer rate is (or can be) quadrupled. Given that a home/stage setup with a single player on a single cable works just fine latency-wise, wouldn't then 16*4 be quite enough? At the risk of paraphrazing Bill Gates, but 64 staves ought to be enough for anyone ... You could fit in two symphonic orchestras, mixed choir, a couple of organs, a big band as well as an extended Irish folk-group into that budget (and then some.) Jokes aside: I don't see any external firewire computing devices where one could send all those midi2 messages to. Anyone else? > When using asynchronous traffic these restrictions don't apply but then > you lose the 'broadcast' advantage, making everything more complex. > > > Pieter --
