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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

MIDI is one of those things that work great in 80-90% of scenarios, and very poorly on the rest. It's actually a lot like other "good enough" technologies with enormous staying power. I don't love MIDI, but I understand it and it "just works" for me, so there is zero incentive to switch.

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yep. MIDI is great for a keyboard/piano interface with velocity, pitch bends and a sustain pedal, maybe some filter modulation if you're feeling frisky. But using it for guitars and orchestras? Use the right keyswitch note to change the articulation, use a different keyswitch to pick the "right" note (since many instruments e.g. guitars have multiple notes that play a C3), maybe the actual notes themselves don't make a sound but instead shape a chord that can be strummed by a separate strum trigger note. Oh and the dynamics of the sound might be controlled by a CC, which shows up in Kontakt if you're lucky and requires looking at the manual if you're not. Oh yeah and none of this is standardized, so a Spitfire orchestra library's keyswitch controls are entirely different from EastWest. Fun.

Sounds like MIDI 2.0 will help with some of this, at least.

Your comment about guitars is why I decided to continue playing with guitars despite the EDM craze(and I love EDM).

The ability to create analog waves naturally is something that I thought software would struggle with, or at a minimum, be too difficult/time consuming.

It hasnt turned into anything useful, never ended up making any public music, but as far as I can tell, I can create weird sounding music faster than anyone with software.

I'm happily waiting for AI Music to turn my blah into fab.

Aren't most musical scores these days all done in MIDI? With the other option being to hire X number of musicians plus a conductor? So seems like a pretty AMAZING thing that this 80s technology is able to do what previously took a score of people to do, and a use case that was probably not considerated during it's creation.

It's great. I have a 8x8 motu midi rack that i've had for probably 25 years, might be one of the only consistent pieces of rack gear I've had.

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