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From: dt@yenta.alb.nm.us (David B. Thomas)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics,comp.music
Subject: MIDI data compression idea
Keywords: MIDI
Message-ID: <1990Nov15.173346.11644@yenta.alb.nm.us>
Date: 15 Nov 90 17:33:46 GMT
Organization: yenta unix pc, rio rancho, nm
Lines: 23

All this talk of interfacing MIDI to PC serial ports got me thinking:

Aren't MIDI messages horrendously inefficient?  I seem to remember
reading that normal note data, in order to be distinguishable from
control messages, has to have the eighth bit turned off.  But the
data is still logically grouped in eight-bit chunks, so you get
something like this:

0000xxxx
0000yyyy

where "xxxxyyyy" is the actual data byte.

Of course, the control messages use the other bits, but they still appear
compressable.  I'll bet with a smart midi card doing hardware compresssion
(and buffering), you could cut the throughput of actual bits down to 19.2k
and not lose any (valid) information.

						Comments?

						little david
-- 
You mean you WUZ a Romanian....MUTHA!