Hector Martin

playing MIDI out to a hardware synth is just TAS playback for music you could even do it with the same hardware

TIL that MIDI cables could trivially be bidirectional, they have enough unused pins for it, wtf

why is MIDI on 5-pin cables when it only uses 3? apparently people even make adapters to do MIDI over 3-pin XLR (since you're more likely to have giant reels of that than 5-pin DIN)

DMX has the right idea, it's 5-pin and uses that to do _bidirectional_ serial I mean, a lot of people don't actually use the return, so they can do it over 3-pin with readily-available adapters, but w/e, nobody does it over _two separate cables_

The only sad part is 5-pin XLR is ridiculously expensive compared to 3-pin.

damn you're right guess this is why some people do DMX over Cat5

and why every rental shop gives you a pair of 5<->3 adapters in opposite gender configurations with every DMX light (I'd always figured that was just for convenience, so you don't have to keep 3-pin and 5-pin cables separate)

(usually I see the pairs heat-shrunk together, and half the time they're just left connected to the light in the case, as long as there's enough clearance)