ast month I talked about some recent additions to the MIDI Specification that will help to keep it alive and relevant in the 21st century, and about the problems of running MIDI over USB, the ubiquitous connection scheme that’s been replacing serial, parallel and SCSI cables over the last couple of years. (Please see "Into the Millennium with Midi?" from January "Features" Archive)

This month, I’ll look at how MIDI relates to IEEE-1394, the new communications protocol that’s worming its way not only into the computer world, but also into everything from video cameras to dishwashers to cars.

IEEE-1394, as everybody knows by now, was developed by Apple back in 1995 and dubbed FireWire. It was adopted by the Standards Association of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and thus entered the public sphere with a boring name. (Apple will license its name and logo to anyone for free, but Sony calls it “iLink,” and other companies use their own monikers.)

1394 is a serial protocol that runs at speeds from 100 to 400 megabits/second, and work is currently under way (and expected to be completed in the first half of 2001) to increase the top speed to as high as 3.2 Gigabits/sec. Even better, it can support multiple data streams simultaneously, bidirectionally and running at different clock rates—so you can be sending and receiving MP3 audio, 96kHz audio, compressed and uncompressed video, and MIDI, and at the same time scanning stuff into PhotoShop, all over the same 1394 cable, without any of them getting into each other’s way.

Unlike MIDI, 1394 is not free for any manufacturer to use, but the licensing terms are pretty painless: There’s no association to join or dues to pay, and no requirement that Apple or anyone else must certify that a 1394 device works the way it’s supposed to. There is a charge of 25 cents per device that reaches the marketplace. (But for a handful of large companies, like Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Panasonic, that have joined Apple’s patent pool, that charge is waived.) Originally, Apple wanted to charge much more, but in the face of competition from Intel’s USB 2.0, according to some sources in the industry, they backed down. It was a good political move, to say the least.

Unlike USB, which was really created to replace mouse and modem ports, 1394 was designed from the ground up for media applications. Already, as we saw last month, USB is being pushed to its limits, and even consumers are catching on: As one source told me, USB-powered speakers are “failing miserably” in the marketplace. Even in the simplest of environments, USB systems can easily get overloaded—I spent a couple of hours with a client last month beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to get her new iMac-based MIDI system working, until I realized that the fancy USB hub she had couldn’t supply enough power to run her scanner, her fax modem and her MIDI interface at the same time!

Reprinted with permission from Magazine, February, 2001
© 2001, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved