RE: FireWire

["Stephen P. Goodman" <sgoodman@earthlight.net>]

Michael Pycraft Hughes [mailto:pycraft@elec.gla.ac.uk] asked:

> Out of interest, has anyone started working on a MIDI
> replacement based around FireWire?

While we've been reading about FireWire for some years now, it hasn't 
become
the broadly accepted process that we all hoped, perhaps because of the
unfortunate practice of what I call "Beta-ism"; it's not like FireWire's
been licensed to too many vendors, nor have tech specs been released to the
general public so that They can make devices that use it too.

Sony home components have been sporting a FW-like port in their backs for
several years also, but even they seem ambivalent with respect to
propagation of this potentially nice method of linking everything up.  At a
low end effort, even MIDI could be transposed upon it, with no data changes
beyond the transport/protocol.  But of course that would require a
mega-committee that can't even agree who belongs, to convene about THAT.
Which could also be a good reason why we've heard mostly theory about FW,
and a smattering of products.

Well, that's it then.  They're all dragging their heels, folks.  Who wants
to figure out how to  transpose MIDI onto Ethernet?  It's THERE already, 
and
a standard worldwide... and could provide REAL "convergence", to use this
year's overused buzzword.

Stephen GoodmanÊ *Ê It's The Loop Of The Week!
EarthLight StudiosÊ *Ê http://www.earthlight.net/Studios