[Bug 18764] MIDI messages don't all have a channel, and status should be part of data.

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18764

Jussi Kalliokoski <jussi.kalliokoski@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |jussi.kalliokoski@gmail.com

--- Comment #1 from Jussi Kalliokoski <jussi.kalliokoski@gmail.com> 2012-09-05 09:48:22 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #0)
> After looking at all the MIDI messages, including sysex, and examining the
> other MIDI APIs out there, I don't think we should break out the status and the
> channel separately in sendMessage(), and I also don't think we should break out
> status and channel from the rest of the data in a MIDIMessage.
> 
> For the first point - Windows API names the first byte "status", but packs them
> all into a dword, and doesn't break channel apart; CoreMIDI uses MIDIPackets,
> which contain pure data (i.e. they don't distinguish status bytes from any
> other bytes; in fact, it does not even appear to be a requirement that there
> only be one MIDI message per packet, just that the packets contain complete
> MIDI messages.)
> 
> For the second point, when forwarding the data on to the underlying APIs, you
> will need the status byte as part of the data; it would be considerably easier
> to have it all together, and not significantly harder to access data[0] instead
> of status in MIDIMessage.  At any rate, MIDIMessage should definitely not have
> a channel.

This is something I've been thinking about as well. It should be simple enough
to separate the status and channel manually:

var status = 0xF0 & firstByte
var channel = 0x0F & firstByte

And merging them is even less of a hassle.

I think it might be a good idea to just stuff this information into a single
byte, as is intended in MIDI anyway. Unless there are objections, I will make
the necessary changes to the spec soon.

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Received on Wednesday, 5 September 2012 09:48:23 UTC