The MIDI Association Annual Meeting 2023

The MIDI Association held its annual meeting of December 5, 2023 with a focus on MIDI 2.0 as MIDI Association companies including Apple, Korg, Native Instruments and Roland have recently released MIDI 2.0 Products.

The Executive Board and Technical Standards Board for for 2024 were announced.

The messaging for MIDI 2.0 was presented by Paul McCabe from Roland.

Lee Whitmore, co-chair of the MIDI in Music Education SIG (along with Athan and Denis Labrecque) said that the group is always welcoming more volunteer help. Their focus is creation of MIDI education materials. The group is currently reviewing proposals for resources, and plan to develop a certification program with different levels.

Jay Pocknell presented a report on the state of accessibility. He is a partially sighted MIDI user working with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). He pointed out that. "something that is easy to use is easier for everyone." Companies are getting involved, Jay said, but more collaboration is needed.

Michael Loh represented the OS/API WG which included members representing Apple, Google Microsoft and Linux as well as participation from DAWs companies including Avid, Bitwig, Logic, MultitrackStudio and Steinberg. The WG plans to hold six open sessions per year. The first was last week and focused on DAWs and plugins.

Florian Bomers, from the Transport WG, attended the recent Audio Developers Conference in London to update developers on MIDI 2. Florian is overseeing the Network MIDI 2.0 specification with the design completed and 9 companies prototyping. The MIDI Association members plan to have demos at the MIDI Association NAMM booth (Hall A 10302) in January.

Andrew Mee explained that the Prototyping Working Group is now the Developer Support WG. Andrew is newly elected to the MMA Technical Standards Board (TSB). He talked about the new open source MIDI 2.0 resources available at MIDI2.dev

Rick Cohen gave the TSB Summary. Each MMA member company has a TSB representative, as well as access to forums (discuss.midi.org). Additionally there are 15 GitHub repositories for code. The TSB produced ten approved specs for 2023. Five more have completed 30-day review and will now move to member voting. Rick provided details about the TSB's working groups and subcommittees.

Mike Kent detailed forthcoming projects from the MIDI 2 Working Group. DAW Control Profile and SMF2 Container are two that Mike singled out as priorities for the near future.

Pete Brown concluded the hour-long meeting by mentioning the MIDI 2 readiness events that were held in 2023. These included gatherings in Tokyo, Japan and Redmond, Washington. "We have tools to help you with your implementations," Pete told participants. He added that all major operating systems now offer resources for MIDI 2. He also reminded members to begin using the new MIDI logo.

For a complete summary including photos and PDFs of the music accessibility presentation and technical presentations go to: The MIDI Association Annual Meeting article on MIDI.org