MIDI Association announces MIDI 2.0 Development Tools
MIDI Association has released details of an ongoing, industry-wide initiative, by over 50 MIDI Association companies, to develop MIDI 2.0 products and services.
In spite of the challenges created by the pandemic, MIDI Association members have collaborated to create a variety of tools for working with MIDI 2.0:
Yamaha Corporation has funded the development of MIDI Workbench, a software tool for MIDI 2.0 testing and compliance, developed by Australian Andrew Mee.
Andrew Mee has also updated firmware for the TB2 Groovesizer, an Open Source MIDI 2.0 hardware synthesizer developed by Jean Marais, a South African living in Taiwan.
Canadian-based company AmeNote, founded by industry veterans Mike Kent (Chair of the MIDI 2.0 Working Group) and Micheal Loh (founder of iConnectivity) has designed ProtoZOA, a flexible Raspberry Pico based prototyping tool for MIDI 2.0.
To accelerate MIDI 2.0 development, the MIDI Association has helped fund ProtoZOA’s technical development and donated ProtoZOAs and TB2 Groovesizers at no charge to any MIDI Association member who wanted to join the prototyping effort.
These tools work together for prototyping and testing foundational MIDI 2.0 features such as the new Universal MIDI Packet, MIDI-CI Discovery, Profile Configuration, Property Exchange, USB MIDI 2.0, and MIDI 1.0 to 2.0 Translation.
With these advances, companies around the world now have software and hardware tools to build and compatibility test MIDI 2.0 products.
Amenote developed the ProtoZOA using Raspberry PICO CPUs, because they are openly accessible and affordable.
ProtoZOA is a USB MIDI 2.0 device that software developers can use to test with their MIDI 2.0 applications. Its firmware provides source code that hardware developers can incorporate into their own MIDI 2.0 devices. MIDI Association members are currently helping to test, and optimize the ProtoZOA code.
“Our plan is to release most of the ProtoZOA source code as Open Source with a permissive license.” noted AmeNote’s Mike Kent. “That will allow even non-MIDI Association members to use the code to develop MIDI 2.0 products.”
“These MIDI 2.0 prototyping efforts highlight what is truly unique about the MIDI Association,” stated MIDI Association president, Athan Billias. “Since MIDI’s genesis, companies that are traditionally fierce competitors have chosen cooperation as the best way to solve difficult problems—and to contribute those solutions at no charge back to the global community, for the benefit of musicians, artists, and engineers everywhere.”
