Michael Gogins wrote:
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Day 
> To: Csound mailing list 
> Date: Monday, April 27, 1998 6:12 AM
> Subject: More on floats in Midi
> 
> >Simple 16 bit integers would allow you to divide 10 octaves into interval
> >of 0.183105 cents, and a dynamic range of 130 dB into intervals 0.00198364
> >dB, do we really need 32 bit floats or even floats at all.
> 
> Engineering of all sorts in general, and music engineering in particular,
> has repeatedly found with pain and suffering that numbers deemed too precise
> or too big to start with are nothing like big enough in the end.
> 

What's all this talk about 32 bit floats,etc ? Maybe I'm missing the
obvious, but wouldn't some hypothetical future networked MIDI
replacement transmit messages in ASCII and not binary? IOW, wouldn't you
want to transmit a value of 2.67 as the ASCII string "2.67"? What
argument could you make for transmitting binrary floats instead? Please
don't say because ASCII takes more bandwidth and processing time to
decode - I sincerely doubt that this would be the limiting factor!

Or perhaps you *don't* want to be able to telnet to a synthesizer that
implements this hypothetical protocal, and be able to type in simple
test messages. Or be able to write simple filters using pipes and perl,
etc.

Larry
 



--  Larry Troxler --  lt@westnet.com  --  Patterson, NY USA  --