There is already a thread that has MIDI 2.0 Capability Inquiry in its title, so given the specificity of that title I thought I would start another one for this other side to MIDI 2.0.
This is the first pairing of apps I’ve heard of that support the new higher resolution messages and the successor to MPE that MIDI 2.0 brings. WoodTroller and WoodSynth:
I havent had a chance to try them yet. I will. Anybody else with suitable Apple hardware taking a look at these?
is there an mpe controller which supports this yet?
I cannot think of controller that supports midi 2.0…
if we start to get a few synths / daws that support it, I’ll definitely consider adding it to the Eigenharp… as its internal data stream is already 32bit, so would benefit from higher res.
will it feel better?
depends on the synth, if done well I think it will…
for years, Ive used Aalto over T3D (32 bit osc) with the Eigenharps, and its much better than using MPE (7bit)… though it does also publish full touch message in ONE message, rather than a stream, which I think is also pretty important.
but we will see 
as wolfsynth… 90 euros - ouch… I’ll think about it… not really bought/used any vsts lately, and its does seem that interesting as a synth.
as for listing midi 2… we could create another wiki page ?
Im not sure we have enough synths/hardware quite yet.
also Id probably want to have some ‘guidelines’ on what to include.
particularly…
the other possibility is, we take our existing topics (hardware and software), and start noting those with MIDI 2.0 support.
I could see broadening that topic possibly being a better idea, so we only have one place to look.
after all, midi 2.0 (and daws etc) are backwards compatible. so we can see MPE/Midi 2.0 as features.
also its require minimal changes to those wiki pages.
title change, and splitting into groups ?
MPE only , MIDI 2.0 only (?) , MPE + MIDI 2.0
whats nice about this approach is… presuming MIDI 2 gets widespread adoption, for many synths/hardware we will simply just ‘move it’ from MPE only (default for now) to MPE+MIDI2
objections? thoughts?
I’ve got WoodSynth on the ipad where I believe it was much cheaper. As for controllers, I guess I’ll use WoodTroller for that for initial testing, since its one of those virtual control surfaces for ipad that already supported MPE and now supports the higher res MIDI 2.0 equivalent.
If I could get my head around the required coding, I might be tempted to make a MPE+ (from Osmose etc) to MIDI 2.0 converter, mostly just for early experimentation purposes.
I havent got thoughts about the wiki yet, no rush I’d say.
The new Korg keyboards got officially announced now too (were leaked earlier) but the primary marketing focus of their MIDI 2.0 stuff at this stage looks to be the auto-mapping side of things, which isnt surprising.
PS. As far as I know Windows MIDI 2.0 support isnt quite available yet, its coming, so I focus on Apple for now. Havent yet looked into what the checkbox in Logic that enables MIDI 2.0 actually does yet, and dont know my way round Logic well at all.
Section 14.17 of the WoodSynth manual is essential reading when trying to make stuff work, and for existing limitations and test example of it working (ios to mac MIDI over network apparently converts back to MIDI 1.0, MIDI from DAW setting in WoodSynth uses JUCE and doesnt work):
yeah, that could work, pretty straightforward too … it would be interesting see if its feels any better.
for the eigenharp, Ive already got MPE+ , so very easy to move that over (without a translation layer)
I could also do something with the Embodme Erae Touch using their API, but I need to check the touch resolution to see if its actually going to make any difference.
edit: ok, api is 32 bit , and they mentioned midi2 internally… so 
should be high res, well better than 7 bit 
all the above, assumes that WoodSynth is
a) a good references implementation of midi 2
b) its sound engine is good enough for us to really ‘feel’ the difference between MPE/Midi2
I’ve not got a modern iPad, so thats not viable for me…and Im not really interested in virtual surfaces etc… Im mostly interested if it feels better… thats where my hope lies (based on my T3D experience)
cool, ok important part is…
“Note : currently Midi V2 is only implemented in the direct connection to the OS midi system so
switch off “Midi from DAW” when running WoodSynth in a DAW.”
so, on Mac, we have to go via core midi … not a big deal, but good to know.
If I decide to do this, I might reach out to the developers.
(who appear to have the longest domain name in the world 
)
Thanks for your thoughts on this so far.
I’ve successfully done the most basic test on ipad using WoodTroller and WoodSynth in direct communication with each other, and the examples they gave in the manual.
Beyond that I’m mostly thwarted so far because there is a lack of info about what MIDI 2.0 features Logic actually supports. And for MIDI 2.0 I lack the usual sort of troubleshooting and checking tools such as a decent MIDI Monitor. So I dont even know if Logic is currently supposed to support 2.0 per-note pitch bend, either in the timeline or in any of its own instruments that do support MPE. And I cant fully establish whether a direct USB ipad to mac virtual MIDI connection supports 2.0 or falls back to MIDI 1.0, suspect the latter but cannot evaluate fully. Might have to knock something up myself to help check, eg perhaps I can get a MIDI monitor going using MIDIKit if its touted 2.0 support is actually working and I manage to stumble around Swift enough for this task.
I mentioned this overall topic on the audiobus forum today and the WoodSynth developer has now been in touch there if you are interested. I doubt they’ve had much in the way of 2.0 stuff by other companies with which to check whether they’ve got everything right at this stage. See this post onwards: WoodTroller by Woodman's Immaculate Maple Syrup Studio - Page 4 — Audiobus Forum
Given their longstanding MIDI 2.0 support, series of documented updated that further improved and added to this, and support for mixing this with MPE, CLAP plugins etc, I might need to consider investing in Multitrack Studio if I want to be a 2.0 early adopter.
eg here are their release logs:
Started messing around with Apple sample code, on the mac initially as its more convenient:
Have been able to see MIDI 2.0 messages coming from WoodTroller on mac to the sample receiver app.
Dropdown list in Apples sample sender app confirms that even the USB C direct wired ipad to/from mac connection is limited to MIDI 1.0.
yeah, unfortunately midi 2 really needs a bit more inertia…
I think most of us are tempted to wait until we get Midi 2 support on windows,
this is when 3rd party libraries like Juce/PortMidt/RtMidi will likely add to their apis.
as a dev Im kind of reluctant to start adding macOS specific code, rather than using abstractions that will deal with Mac/Windows and Linux.
so really, doing this is more out of idle curiosity more than anything else
(though in fairness, I do alot for this reason… so its not unusual)
Yes. I’m only looking now because those Wood apps added some initial MIDI 2.0 support. And because I’ve barely bothered to learn anything about the actual implementation details of MIDI 2.0 so far, just the higher level concepts, and want to gradually start to fill in some gaps in my mind. The sort of ‘barely a programmer at all’ programmer I am means I’m especially reliant on third party libraries to do most of the heavy lifting.
Thinking about some of the high resolution possibilities made me realise in the last day or so quite how little attention I’ve paid to this side of thing in DAWs and software synth plugins in the past, more broadly speaking in terms of parameter resolution beyond 7 bits in general, let alone anything 2.0 specific. The last time I did anything involved trying to see if I could spot the difference between MPE and MPE+ from the Osmose using someones VCV Rack module that had MPE+ support. I wasnt convinced I could tell the difference very strongly, and then we get into issues about how much synths already slew/smooth signals, at which point my attention drifted elsewhere.
I have got back into computer->CV stuff very recently (got a Behringer Kobol this week) so I suppose thats another area I could use to explore resolution advantages beyond the polyphonic expression context.
Another non-MPE (and so drifting off-topic for this forum) test project I might consider would be conversion of hardware encoders to MIDI 2.0 high res messages. eg I could convert some 14 bit midi CC hardware MIDI output messages to MIDI 2.0, or hack around with my own program that can use the Ableton Push encoders and screen to store and adjust banks of high res parameters. Again just as a 2.0 learning exercise really, rather than anything that I expect to be a vast improvement over the currently available non-2.0 options. I think I’d be more likely to try this now if one of the DAWs I already liked using had some MIDI 2.0 support, I still havent decided whether to invest in MultitrackStudio. At a minimum I will evaluate the desktop version of WoodSynth running standalone, and see if it inspires me to take any of this stuff further sooner rather than later.
After talking to the WoodTroller developer I was able to get MIDI CI & Property Exchange auto-config stuff working between WoodTroller on a mac and the Korg native soft synths on the same mac. But Korg have not implemented any high resolution message stuff into these initial ‘MIDI 2.0’ offerings, they have focussed pretty much only on the CI/Property Exchange stuff. I am under the impression that this is also the case when it comes to their Keystage controller at the moment.
It remains something of a mystery as to what 2.0 features NI have actually implemented on their controller that ‘suppoorts MIDI 2.0’, possibly nothing useful at all at this stage, hard to tell!
It sounds like the Roland keyboard that they announced years ago as being their first MIDI 2.0 device, did actually get some high resolution messaging support added to it when they released the first firmware that actually enabled some MIDI 2.0 features. And I believe this was briefly demonstrated in the sonicstate NAMM 2024 video of the MIDI 2.0 booth at that show.
On the expressive controller front that would be of interest to us here at polyexpression, I dont think I have heard any relevant news yet. I dont think I heard embodme shouting about MIDI 2.0 when showing off their new iteration of the ERAE at NAMM2024, but perhaps they did in videos I havent seen. I will certainly keep an eye on their site to see if they mention it when they actually update the site to include full info about that new controller.
I didnt decide whether to proceed with my own software-based MIDI 2.0 experiments yet. I will evaluate some of the tools available on github this week, to see if it is feasible for me to easily hack something together yet.
Ive thought for a while MIDI-CI is the bit that we will see rolling out first…
partly because configuration is traditionally such a pain in midi with so many bespoke solutions.
its cool to see that JUCE has midi ci support already (from 7.0.9).
when asked recently (nov 23) when they might add, ump support, they said they were waiting for windows support, which makes sense.
( see MIDI 2.0 Device Support - JUCE )
given how much of the user base is on windows, makes little sense for most devs to really focus too heavily on midi 2.0… and actually see how Microsoft implementation works out in practice
(as we all know how both Microsoft and Apple like to diverge )
but Microsoft is making good progress with dev previews.
though notably… Microsoft don’t have a date for end user release yet, just vaguely
"For planning purposes, we expect to have a first version of the full MIDI 2.0 stack out near the end of this year. "
given how many users are on windows, I cannot see us getting a huge amount of inertia until Microsoft push this out of the door.
The ‘near the end of this year’ comment was written last year so I alerted them about that and they have changed the wording.
The developer of Multitrack Studio has been pretty active on the forum for the Microsoft MIDI 2 project. Seems that it helped move the project along.
hi all, some news which may be interesting :
I just released WoodSynth 3.7 which has support for the UMP 16/32 bits in AU for LogicPro when routing the midi input via the DAW to the plugin.
Unfortunately the new midi2 commands like Pitch Per Note are not passed to the AU and also sysex messages are not passed so no CI. Of course WoodSynth can access the Core-Midi directly to have full midiv2 support.
The Korg keyscape keyboards work for CI property exchange with WoodSynth both on Mac and iPad.
WoodTroller works (CI property exchange) with the Korg apps also from iPad to Mac.
And I made a WoodTroller VST3 for NKS2 which bridges the new NI keyboards to the midi (v1, v2) world as currently the NI midi v2 is only sending the DeviceInfo resource and no Initiator handling of ProgramLists and ParameterLists. And WoodTroller does send the midi v2 UMP 32 bits values.
best,
Woodman
I have now briefly glanced at the MIDI 2.0 MPE profile that they published this year. Not sure what other details I mised so far, but the two things that stuck out most upon this initial glance:
Option to replace channel aftertouch and CC74 7 bit messages with 14 bit bipolar RPN messages.
They’ve changed the zones stuff. Can now have more than 2 zones, but they’ve broken the old upper zone in the process, because global channel for each zone is now the lowest channel in the range of channels used by that zone.
Interesting, that zone allocation scheme was the original (roli?) proposal for mpe.
It was then simplified to what we got with just two zones. Bit of a bodge job.
Few synths support even the two zone setup - so not a big deal to change now.
I think this approach is better, it’s more coherent when coding. I think of it as a split, then lower channel is always global.
A summary article on their site which describes the profiles that have now been adopted, does a pretty good job of summarising the MPE changes when it gets to that particular profile. Its a much easier read than wading through the full tech spec document for that profile, unless you are a developer who really needs to know the full details, or are left with questions this summary article doesnt pretend to cover.
Note they explicitly mention that you can have more than 16 channels in an MPE setup, and discuss the bidirectional aspect of config and responsibilities in more detail, which are things I didnt cover properly in my previous post.
I also note that in keeping with the world moving on from certain language, what I was recently calling the MPE Global channel in order to avoid the old word, now seems to be called the Manager channel in the official nomenclature.