MP3 killed MIDI?

Of course not. At the turn of the 20th century everybody was saying that photography killed painting. And later cinema killed theatre, and television killed cinema. The last technological revolution, the digital one, killed the business of the record companies. And this time, it may be finally true...

MIDI is about making music, and making music is about musical instruments. After all, a business that remains still alive is the musical instruments industry. Not all the musical instruments sold around the world are bought by professional musicians. Most of the market are aficionados and hobbyists. Everybody would like, in one or another point of the life, to become a musician, or learn to play a musical instrument. Well, this is the place of the MIDI software in the desktop ecosystem. It is not about passively listening music, but using tools to inspect, interact, learn, modify, understand music. That may explain how VMPK had more than 5000 downloads from SourceForge last month. Even when it is not able to play songs by itself!

There was once a day something called "Pianola", a piano player product manufactured by the Aeolian Company. It was so popular that the trade mark has been adopted in Spanish (and in other languages as well) as a generic name, and entered the official dictionary. The company ended in bankruptcy about only 25 years ago, but the idea behind it still exists. The Disklavier models by Yamaha are offering today a similar functionality, but using MIDI files instead of punched paper rolls.

Well. All the above small talk was, of course, an excuse and introduction for another KMid post. The next week there will be a new release (0.2) of the program, after some changes triggered by an usability review. Big kudos to the KDE usability team and Diego Moya for his report! One of the new included features is the ability to launch soft-synths (TiMidity++ or FluidSynth) from inside KMid2, as child processes. The communication between KMid and the soft synths is handled by the ALSA sequencer, using the standard MIDI protocol. This has two consequences: the soft synths are still loosely tied optional dependencies, and the program is still able to communicate with external musical instruments, hardware synths, or many other soft synths, which is a very important feature for me. This also means that KMid is still for Linux only, because ALSA is only available for Linux (the Salsa library has only very basic ALSA features, and it is not enough for KMid).

There will be in the future other backends for KMid. I'm planning native backends for Mac OSX and Windows, using the native MIDI subsystems of each operating system, and also a backend based on libfluidsynth, which may be very comfortable for casual users, and available for more platforms.