Why has no one combined Bluetooth and Midi?
Is this perhaps a killer app for Bluetooth technology that has gone ignored for far too long? Think of all of the potentially amazing uses there could be for this technology. It could eliminate wires in all sorts of places that would give musicians amazing new freedoms. It would be incredible for a keyboard player to not be tied to a rack and to still maintain a completely digital signal path right up until amplification (which should be all Class A tube...duhh). Or the placement of drum triggers/triggers in general. How great would it be to just throw up a bunch of battery powered bluetooth midi triggers and operate them off stage very simply with a computer. It would be brilliant! Why does this not exist? It can most certainly handle the bandwidth!
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Is this perhaps a killer app for Bluetooth technology that has gone ignored for far too long? Think of all of the potentially amazing uses there could be for this technology. It could eliminate wires in all sorts of places that would give musicians amazing new freedoms. It would be incredible for a keyboard player to not be tied to a rack and to still maintain a completely digital signal path right up until amplification (which should be all Class A tube...duhh). Or the placement of drum triggers/triggers in general. How great would it be to just throw up a bunch of battery powered bluetooth midi triggers and operate them off stage very simply with a computer. It would be brilliant! Why does this not exist? It can most certainly handle the bandwidth!
I'd imagine in a live performance, the direct connection guarantee is more important than an extra wire.
That is totally reasonable and it does offer a good explanation for why it might not be 100% desirable. However, think of all of the guitarists out there that use radio transmitters for their electric guitars and vocalists that sing into wireless microphones. These things are done wirelessly on a fairly widespread level and are decidedly less reliable than a simple cable connection. In the case of midi, it wouldn't even require analog to digital conversion, and I imagine that bluetooth is much more reliable than those UHF wireless systems or whatever it is that they rely on these days.
I have used M-Audio keyboard (about 4-octave IIRC) USB as well as M-Audio 24bit 48khz breakout box... Mucking around with Trance dance music composed with Ableton Live Rewired to Reason 2.x.
A full wireless setup would definitely be very advantageous. With MIDI and recording there are concerns with latency so that's why you need a very solid wireless solution so that everything is realtime, since in music even 1/128th of a note can make a difference in timing, to exaggerate slightly. Bluetooth could well handle all this.
Somehow pro musicians are all very used to wires and besides USB for computer gear they are used to DIN connections for most stuff, otherwise RCA for mixers, some BNC(?) in there...
I've seen Chemical Brothers live and their setups are insane. I don't think wireless solutions are really reasonable but they could grow from a zero-latency MIDI-keyboard-to-Mac usage and then move onwards from there. Cost could be an issue...?
Wouldn't the latency of bluetooth get in the way? That's the argument by gamers against bluetooth mice... I'd imagine it'd apply just as much here.
How is the Apple wireless mouse and keyboard? Is there still some latency on the Apple wireless mouse? What about Logitech bluetooth and non-bluetooth mice? Are there still latency issues? I tried a Logitech bluetooth mouse like two years ago, the latency was a bit annoying.
I think we *may* have to look towards the next generation of Bluetooth or the replacement for bluetooth for short-medium range wide-bandwidth wireless interconnectivity. Something with almost the range of 802.11b/g but with zero latency and 802.11g-level of bandwidth.
Pippin, I think you are spot on about the music industry having worked all this stuff out already with wireless mics and wireless guitars, etc. Which are all obviously zero-latency otherwise those wireless solutions are useless. Wikipedia has a good run-down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_microphone
I think as computers are used more and more in professional music production, there should be wireless - midi and wireless - digital audio standards that develop. UHF, VHF and XLR are terms you'd find which are "old skool" for those coming from the computing side, but they're mainstays in the music industry.
So features we are looking for are
-a common, open, interoperable standard
-for MIDI, digital and analog audio
-zero latency
-high bandwidth and throughput
-medium to long range (eg. from the performance stage to the core mixing board in the middle of the crowd)??
Edit:
Also this gets mixed up with Video as well somewhere along the way if you are talking about convergence, computer-driven, and home theatre setups. Like playback and recording of video at live gigs, for example. Then HDTV, talking about HDCP and all that... wooooooo messy.