Midi for iPhone..

ibi sum EMAIL HIDDEN
Sat Mar 27 11:09:33 CET 2010


> Ha!!! Now how cool is that!!!


I have been investigating the technology required to do this properly
for years now, and to do it properly, it requires a jailbreak, as this
expansion i/o functionality is not officially supported by Apple and
they refuse to allow hardware manufacturers to add expansion
capabilities to the iPhone product line easily.  The reason for this is
simple: expansion i/o for MIDI on the iPhone should *properly* be done
with a device driver, and it is illegal (per Apples rules) to write a
device-driver for iPhone OS.  Only Apple can do that.  Quite a deal with
Apple must be made to do this with digital i/o on the iPhone expansion
port.  You can design the hardware, but if you do something odd that
Apple doesn't like, your app won't get approved for the store and thus:
you can only sell to jailbroken devices.

There is also another rumor that this MIDI interface *doesn't* require
jailbreak because it uses the iPhones' audio i/o to, quite literally,
modulate audio and demodulate audio into MIDI signals, effectively
meaning that this thing is a MIDI modem.  And this means it will
introduce lag to all i/o - so its not exactly a performance-oriented
interface, more of a 'data backup device for MIDI devices using
SYSEX' ..

More interesting is the WLAN-MIDI bridges that are on their way .. a
number of manufacturers have figured out that they can expose MIDI over
WLAN using Rendezvous/zeroconf (finally .. geeze .. I wanted to
implement this in 2002) and with the next update to iPhone OS4.0 comes
enumeration services for Rendezvous-for-Audio (which includes MIDI as a
subset) .. so when the iPad is launched, shortly afterwards will come
MIDI-WLAN interfaces that expose MIDI as a zeroconf service, and so it
goes .. iPad -> WLAN -> MIDI Bridge -> synthesizer ..

Anyway its good to see this sort of functionality *finally* coming to
the iPhone, but there is still a lot of serious shakedown to suffer
through while all these competing methods of supporting "old" MIDI
hardware go through market realities.  I would put my money on WLAN-MIDI
bridges becoming a lot more commonplace hardware relatively shortly, or
just using a service on your already-entrenched DAW to do it for the 19"
rack (already possible with Mac OSX, as we have seen with the multitude
of music-making apps for iPhone which support this, noise.io, Beatmaker,
etc) ..

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;
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ibi sum
::: :::




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