MINI: Making MIDI Fit for Real-Time Musical Interaction over the Internet
Michael Welzl, Max Mühlhäuser, Jan Borchers · 2007
Distributed live music performances over the Internet have become rather popular. For true real time exchange of electronic instrument output, the classical MIDI format is still the only viable choice — but MIDI is inappropriate for the Internet. We propose a MIDI compatible network data format called MINI. MINI eliminates the very disturbing arpeggio effect caused by packet delay jitter in the Internet. Moreover, MINI yields smaller packets and the data size can be further reduced by trading in musical features of marginal interest. Standard MIDI instruments can be used since MIDI-MINI transcoding can be transparently introduced. The paper introduces the design rationale and details of MINI and presents performance results from realistic experiments. 1.