Hector Martin

According to their website, they're focusing on USB first (I guess the old 31kbit UART transport is deprecated, unsurprisingly), and a new mapping for UMP over USB(-audio?) needs to be written before that works. So no automatic backwards compat with MIDI1 byte streams.

One thing they did do is make the UMP format self-delimiting. The message type alone determines message length, and they arbitrarily pre-assigned some lengths to all the unused message types. So transports should be able to deliver UMP messages with future expansions cleanly.

OTOH it is *not* robust at the 32bit word level, so the underlying transport has to guarantee that. If you drop or corrupt a word expect things to explode.

(MIDI1 was slightly better at this with the start/continue markers, but in practice this was useless anyway because as soon as you drop any data you get stuck notes so you're screwed anyway)

Oh yeah, another fix: 7-bit sysex messages are still atomic (except for realtime messages) to preserve MIDI 1.0 compat, but the new 8-bit sysex messages *are* interleavable with other messages and even up to 256 sysex messages may be interleaved together in streams.

I'm pretty sure you can implement it in a firmware update for most devices. Whether manufacturers will bother with legacy devices is a bigger question. Nothing here needs new silicon.

Odds my mid-90s synth gets updated: 0%