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MIDI Association Announces MIDI 2.0 Prototyping (hackaday.com)
MIDI was introduced at the 1983 NAMM show as a means to connect various electronic instruments together. Since then, our favorite five-pin DIN has been stuffed into Radio Shack keyboards, MPCs, synths, eurorack modules, and DAWs. The standard basically hasn't changed. Now, ahead of the 2019 NAMM show, the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) in conjunction with AMEI, Japan's MIDI Association, are announcing MIDI 2.0.
From a report: The new features include, "auto-configuration, new DAW/web integrations, extended resolution, increased expressiveness, and tighter timing." It will retain backwards-compatibility with MIDI 1.0 devices. The new initiative, like the release of the first MIDI spec, is a joint venture between manufacturers of musical instruments. The company lineup on this press release is as follows: Ableton/Cycling '74, Art+Logic, Bome Software, Google, imitone, Native Instruments, Roland, ROLI, Steinberg, TouchKeys, and Yamaha.
Summary is incorrect when it says "MIDI was introduced at the 1983 NAMM show... The standard basically hasn't changed." The first half is true. The follow-on isn't.
MIDI received a major upgrade in 1991 in the form of General MIDI, which dealt with many of the things previously left open to interpretation by manufacturers, such as what order the instruments should go in the patch bank. That's the original MIDI 2.0, we just weren't quite as keen to use that particular notation (outside of software) yet.
I don't object at all to extending MIDI, but I think they should have called it Global MIDI or Universal MIDI or Modern MIDI or something in keeping with the General MIDI naming tradition.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Timing is definitely an issue, even in the early 90's. the bit rate is so low that you can hardly play multiple instruments without noticing serious lag in rythm. which is why daisy chaining doesn't actually work and why your need all your equipment connected to a sequencer with lots of separate outputs.
Don't know why they still kling to the old DIN-port, USB(-c) was the way to go for MIDI 2.0, backwardcompatibility would be done through USB to DIN (which already exist and work perfectly).
Firstly, MIDI is opto-isolated. Without that, you get weird ground-loop effects like the data leaking into the audio, which happens quite a bit when using USB MIDI.
Secondly, MIDI is peer-to-peer whereas USB has a host and a guest. You cannot plug a USB MIDI keyboard into a USB sound module and expect it to work, you have to have a computer somewhere to act as a broker. With MIDI you can take two cables and link three machines together. USB1.1 doesn't work that way, and that's what the USB-DIN adapters are all using. USB-C might be better in that regard, I'm not sure.
You've also got a very large installed base (probably millions of machines) which are using DIN and USB1.1, switching to USB-C isn't going to. They bent over backwards to ensure that MIDI 2.0 is going to work with your $10000 OB-X with Kenton board.
More bandwidth is definitely a big thing - MIDI runs at around 31 Kbit/sec and it's fairly easy to swamp it, especially if you're chaining instruments on a single bus.
Increasing the resolution is Really Big Thing. MIDI is 7-bit, which means that if you do something like sweeping a cutoff filter, you only have 127 possible values which gives you very noticeable stepping artifacts (often called 'zipper noise'). Some manufacturers try to interpolate in software. Others bond two controller streams together so that you get 14-bit precision, or send custom NRPM values but since there are a number of incompatible ways of doing this, you have to have a controller keyboard which works the same way as your synthesizer. Setting out an actually standardised way of doing this would be really handy.