Rowan Posted August 14, 2003 Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 HiI was thinking last night about how nice it would be to cut down the amount of cables in my studio. Then I thought that how nice it would be to have Infer red or some other kind of wireless data connection between all my midi gear.I've never seen such a product for sale. This could be worth investigating further (after I finished the 16 x16 matrix). I can't imagine it would be very hard to implement.Anyway, just another of my hairbrained scheams.Let me know what you think.Rowan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted August 14, 2003 Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 Count me in, schemer ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rowan Posted August 14, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 HiI've been thinking more about this idea. If Infra red was used it would require line of sight between the Tx and Rx? I'de like to avoid this. Maybe an RF link would be more suitable.Rowan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bosskong Posted August 14, 2003 Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 A MIDI -> Bluetooth adapter would be pretty cool... I don't know what kind of ic chips are out there that work with bluetooth or what the prices are, but it seems to me like it would be really cool if you could get rid of all your MIDI cables by building cheap adapters. This would also open up all kinds of options if you could control MIDI hardware with a bluetooth enabled pda or cellphone... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilmenator Posted August 14, 2003 Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 Yeah,let's get back to tiny buttons, small displays and horrible menu structures. All these faders and encoders really disturb the clean look of a nicely polished MIDIbox surface. ???Regards, ilmenator Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bosskong Posted August 15, 2003 Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 Heh, well I'm not talking about getting rid of the midiboxes, or about mixing or composing music with a cellphone. But I can think of a couple of uses right off the top of my head...It might be nice to control MIDI lighting in a club via a PDA. Also, say you're recording vocals by yourself in a soundproof room, it would be cool to be able to press record or punch in/punch out from your cellphone. Of course, I'd rather have a fancy midi control surface than have wireless midi, but why not have both? How about a control surface in the middle of the room that connects wirelessly to your pc? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted August 15, 2003 Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 Bluetooth, nice idea.....Seeing as noone will tell me the secret to finding IC's for a specific purpose ;) :P ... Any suggestions on IC's for bluetooth, anyone? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bosskong Posted August 15, 2003 Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 Looks like Broadcom has the BCM2033 and there's a few others out there. But it looks to be just a bit over my head... :-/Check out this site for bluetooth development info - http://www.thewirelessdirectory.com/Bluetooth-Development/index.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rowan Posted August 15, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 HiDoes the MB com-unity have any RF engineers out there.Rowan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrBunsen Posted August 15, 2003 Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 I'd go for RF instead of IR if possible, longer range, easier to spearate signals. You need RF serial transcievers, they need not be full duplex as MIDI signal is not bi-directional, but you'll be using twice as many. And they aren't cheap - I was looking at some for a wireless modem line, and they were about $45 US.If you are using computers, you could look at using MIDI over Ethernet - there are things out there that'll do that - and wireless 802.11b cards, which (IIRC) appears to the computer as an Ethernet device. If you wanted to be really sure, you could use an external Ethernet->802.11b adapter at each end.This is only good for a situation where you have a PC or laptop at each end. A cheap module you can just plug into the back of a keyboard would be great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Cryshedian Posted August 15, 2003 Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 I looked at some RF transceivers from Linx Technologies once upon a time. Some of their products are available from DigiKey. All of their current products are half-duplex, so if you need to transmit and receive at the same time, you'll probably need use one frequency for transmit and a different frequency for receive. That would probably get messy though. They do have a planned product that is full-duplex, which might be available soon. Here's the link to their product page.http://www.linxtechnologies.com/ldocs/f_prod.htmlMaybe there is something that could be used? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kieran Posted August 16, 2003 Report Share Posted August 16, 2003 Wouldnt either IR or RF put a hell of a lot of latency into the mix?? :-/kieran Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven_C Posted August 17, 2003 Report Share Posted August 17, 2003 no.... I also had a look on the net, and midiman are working on a wireless midi link using bluetooth, and there are a couple of other companies that have already sold such devices (can't remember names though) which are very expensive, one used RF, and it was $1699 for a link (can't remember if it was 2 way or not) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d2k Posted August 22, 2003 Report Share Posted August 22, 2003 looks like Kenton has started this wireless lark:http://sound-on-sound2.infopop.net/2/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=215094572&f=594090574&m=1703015837&r=1703015837#1703015837 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_Swenson Posted August 24, 2003 Report Share Posted August 24, 2003 I've been looking into this for a while. It started out looking into MIDI over powerline (you plug the box iin and the data goes into the wiring). I haven't quite founf the best way to do this yet, the competing technologies are either too slow or too complicated. On the wireless front, the Linx modules seem like a great idea, the are not too expensive and are incredibly easy to interface to MBHP, BUT they have one major drawback for MIDI, no error correction at all. This is very bad when using state change protocol such as MIDI over a noisy channel such as radio. One little burst of noise and the last note you played doesn't go off, or the program change doesn't happen, or even worse goes to something compeltely wrong. Bluetooth on the other hand has a much higher data rate built in error correction, can talk the to the I2C bus of the PIC, BUT the prorocol is very complicted. Since all types of devices can use the same bluetooth spectrum they have come up with different device types and protocols. For example you don't want a printer and cell phone headset talking to each other. What would probably have to happen is a MIDI protocol and device type would have to be designed and ratified by the Bluetooth community. There are some "unspecified" connection types that might be used, but this is dangerous because you never know what might be using that as well which could cause collisions with the midi devices. What would be the quickest is the "cable eliminator" type connection (they have them for serial ports, parallel ports, USB ports etc). You have to have two boxes that will talk to each other and ignore all other bluetooth trafic or other boxes of the same type. You could build midi links out of these, but you cannot have midi bluetooth built into the keyboard, computer, sound module, controler etc and have them talk to each other. THAT takes the official midi protocol and device type. The major issue here is that bluetooth is trying to be a general purpose network, not just a cable eliminator. This is the same problem I had with the powerline systems, the one with the error correction and high bandwidth needed complicated software to make it work.So who wants to draft the official MIDI bluetooth standard ?John S. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted August 25, 2003 Report Share Posted August 25, 2003 Count me in... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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