Bluetooth & MIDI. Together at last ?

An Open Letter to MIDI Device Manufacturers Requesting Bluetooth Support

The year 2003 marked the 20th anniversary of the MIDI protocol that has become ubiquitous in the world of synthesizers, sequencers, and the like. As a corollary, it also marks the twenty year anniversary of the MIDI cable. The standard five pin din MIDI cable has served many a musician connecting simple MIDI controllers to entire racks of gear. They are inexpensive, reliable (most anyway), and easily obtainable. Well, I'd like to see them go away. Far away. I mean, this is 2003 already. We have cellular telephones, wireless internet connections (802.11), satellite radio and TV, wireless keyboards and mice, and GPS. We are surrounded by wireless technology(!), but where is our wireless MIDI connectivity? I could be wrong but bluetooth wireless technology is just SCREAMING, PLEADING to be used with MIDI. A few years ago, at the Summer 2001 NAMM Show, Midiman (now M-Audio), prototyped a bluetooth MIDI interface. While I haven't seen or heard anything about this product since then, I've been hopefully optimistic that devices like this will start to surface. M-Audio is on the right track tinkering with Bluetooth to carry MIDI data, but the MIDI interface they demo'd seems to fall short of the perfect-MIDI-utopia that I'm envisioning. In an all ideal world, any newly-released device (be it a synth module, keyboard, sequencer, etc) that finds it necessary to have a MIDI port should also have a bluetooth implementation built into the device. For all the gear already released into the wild, M-Audio (or some other company) can create a little device that will retrofit our existing MIDI devices to be bluetooth enabled. This would be quite similar to D-Link's bluetooth USB adapter but with a five-pin-din for MIDI instead of USB. At present, we've got MIDI travelling over USB, Firewire (1394), we've even got MIDI over TCP/IP. MIDI over Bluetooth is the next logical progression. If I can expand on this idea a bit, I can imagine that at some point in the future, all of our sequencers (Cubase, Logic, DP, ProTools, Sonar, etc) would be Bluetooth aware. By example, my fresh-off-the-product-line "Oxygen Blue" MIDI controller keyboard would sit on my desk just waiting to be discovered as I fire up Cubase SX 5. Within a config menu somewhere in Cubase, it would auto-detect the presence of my Oxygen Blue. In a similar way that DHCP distributes IP address, Cubase would auto-configure the Oxygen Blue, assigning it a unique MIDI channel(s) and bluetooth ID. From this point on, Cubase treats this device like any other MIDI device, RX'ing and TX'ing on specific MIDI channels in a way that does not break the MIDI protocol. Naturally, there would be some details to sort out. What if I fired up both Cubase and Logic? Who would be the "master" in this case? Perhaps each MIDI device is multi-client and can be a slave to two masters. Who knows? Think of how nice this could make live performances. You might have an 8U rack of your synth modules, samplers, etc, off in the corner of the stage and be able to quickly and easily access them from anywhere on stage via a small controller. MIDI trigger pads could become bluetooth enabled and placed just about anywhere on stage. The new opportunity list goes on and on... My foremost point is that someone needs to start movement in this direction. I can't fathom that most musicians (using even a few MIDI intruments) wouldn't welcome this with arms wide open. My hope is that someone within the major companies (M-Audio, Roland, Akai, Novation, Korg, etc) will really think deeply about this. There would exist a HUGE market for people who would need to "retrofit" their existing MIDI devices with Bluetooth MIDI adapters. This marriage of technology would make the lives of musicians much nicer and, if implemented correctly, helps remove the obstacle of always fiddling with your studio setup. To many musicians, "feeling creative" is often a finite window of time. There is nothing worse than having a musical idea that you'd like to record only to find that you need to spend precious time patching cables here and there. Technology should help you realize your ideas, not get in the way. While MIDI over five-pin-din cables have proven their worth many times over, I think its time to move to the next step: MIDI over Bluetooth. -Jim Vanaria jim (AT) xmidi.com