Extremely frequently. Digital musical instruments generally don’t output production quality sounds – they output MIDI data that describes what note is being played, and an audio synthesizer device or software interprets it and generates the audio data.
Right. I guess I consider that a relatively niche usecase. But on second thought I suppose it’s not that niche once you include hobbyist musicians and that kind of crowd.
I wanted to make the analogy of every tech YouTuber reviewing a laptop or non-high-end PC saying “you’re not going to be rendering long videos on this thing” as if that’s a relatable use case. No, YouTuber, that’s not something most people do on their computers! Most people probably never do it in their life, or only a handful of times ever.
But as I said upon more thought I realize that’s not the case with midi.
Very often. You’re plobably thinking of midi playback, but all of those usb (piano) keyboards, drum pads, etc. use the same protocol. Midi is very much not dead.
I feel like I got pretty lucky with my bitwig setup (on arch)? I selected PipeWire as the output driver and everything just works (no latency, midi is fine, other apps can still be heard). the only caveat is I have to fiddle a bit if I want the audio to be sent over screen sharing apps, which I think introduces a decent amount of latency. Maybe bitwig has invested in some tech the other DAWs don’t have since it’s commercial software and Linux support is one of their competitive advantages…
Choices when trying to get reaper or ardour to work:
Maybe I’m missing something obvious but how often is midi used in modern days?
Extremely frequently. Digital musical instruments generally don’t output production quality sounds – they output MIDI data that describes what note is being played, and an audio synthesizer device or software interprets it and generates the audio data.
Right. I guess I consider that a relatively niche usecase. But on second thought I suppose it’s not that niche once you include hobbyist musicians and that kind of crowd.
I wanted to make the analogy of every tech YouTuber reviewing a laptop or non-high-end PC saying “you’re not going to be rendering long videos on this thing” as if that’s a relatable use case. No, YouTuber, that’s not something most people do on their computers! Most people probably never do it in their life, or only a handful of times ever.
But as I said upon more thought I realize that’s not the case with midi.
it’s absolutely not niche
Any electronic music uses midi basically. So a lot of it
Very often. You’re plobably thinking of midi playback, but all of those usb (piano) keyboards, drum pads, etc. use the same protocol. Midi is very much not dead.
All the time! Not bad for a 1983 protocol.
I feel like I got pretty lucky with my bitwig setup (on arch)? I selected PipeWire as the output driver and everything just works (no latency, midi is fine, other apps can still be heard). the only caveat is I have to fiddle a bit if I want the audio to be sent over screen sharing apps, which I think introduces a decent amount of latency. Maybe bitwig has invested in some tech the other DAWs don’t have since it’s commercial software and Linux support is one of their competitive advantages…
That applies to reaper as well. I think it’s mostly that linux sound servers are a pain.