onelist@... wrote: >any musician who has played a rythmic instrument knows that the timing of the notes played is >the most important factor in getting a solid beat feeling I'm afraid you've missed the mark on your post. A little thought and analysis easily shows that. The current MIDI throughput per MIDI cable or port is about one MIDI instruction per .67 millisec. (Pardon if my memory is slightly out on this.) External synth timing delay is usually at least a few millisec, with timing errors varying widely per synth, but certainly usually the order of the time of a MIDI instruction. So it's easy to see that getting timing down smaller than the time of a MIDI instruction brings little gains (besides marketing). And if you use LA's environments to algorithmically enhance the "live" feel of a MIDI sequence by calculating things like pitch bend, filters, envelopes, etc. from each note on, you see that each note on generates a few (and varying number) of MIDI instructions that preceed the note on. This brings the timing "errors" of the note on up one or two to three or more millisecs easy! So obviously, getting timing errors down to sub-millisecs is more or less a waste of time if you're interested in advanced MIDI capability. If MIDI timing and capability is to be significantly improved the MIDI throughput needs to be greatly increased. This is easily technically done by a factor of 20 to 100 or even more given present technologies (USB, Cat 5 cables (ethernet)). Then it makes sense, and is feasible, to have timing that is again on the order of a MIDI instruction. And this timing will be 20 to 100 times better than present. WISH: The industry adopts a Cat 5 cable "enhanced MIDI speed" standard. (Cat 5 carries 10 to 100 Mb/s on long cables compared to USB). All other parts of the MIDI standard could stay the same. Equivalents of Unitors, etc. pop up with lots of Cat 5 ports. Lots of "small" soundcards with just Cat 5 MIDI in/out and spdif in/out to put into PCs and Macs. "Big" soundcards with lots of spdif in and a few audio and spdif out. With this setup, you'ld have tight timing with digital accuracy with a bank of computers. Hopefully synth makers would adapt so they could be plugged in to. Living in dreamland .... Jim Savage