From: Jim Witte (jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us)
Date: Mon Sep 06 2004 - 12:49:05 PDT
> Midi just stores the instrument info note after note, it's upto the
> synth to
> playback the associated sound. That's why MIDIs are generally small,
> the
I'm not talking about stripping out information in MODs when
converting to MIDI - just sticking them all in system-exclusive
packets. There maybe things MODs can do that would be prohibitively
complicated to do using this scheme (for instance if MOD allows for
exact micro-tonal frequency determination - that can't be done in MIDI
without basically abandoning the advantages of MIDI)
The advantages of this scheme (if it would be workable) would be that
there would be one format , and so (in time), one player which could
play anything in the format. Different effects would be loaded as
plugin sets that would map to different SYSEX messages.
It would also mean that theses MIDI-MOD files should be playable with
standard MIDI players - as long as they ignored the SYSEX messages, or
by standard MIDI keybaords, as long as they ignored the SYSEX messages
(which they presumably wouldn't understand, although I don't know if a
central registry of General MIDI SYSEX messages for different synths
exists anywhere).
The big problem is that MIDI only supports 8 channels per track (of
course, it supports more then 1 track, at least type-1 does, but this
makes the player software more difficult as it needs to keep track of
timing for multiple tracks at once. Yeah, there was X-MIDI using some
kind of tri-nary logic that placed extra data in 'trits' between
standard MIDI bits, thus preserving backward compatibility with
existing, binary, MIDI hardware, but I don't think that went anywhere.
Another possibility (just as unlikely) would be to revive the MOD
format, perhaps changed a bit, and make it a new MIDI format - given
the advantage that it supports more than 8 channels per track.
Of course, I could (and probably am) wrong about the feasibility of
this - I need to review the MOD format - it's been years since I looked
at it last.
Jim
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