As yet MIDI 2 is just at the protocol specification stage and the USB mechanism is the first of the the hopefully many ways of connecting devices.

So far there is no MIDI file specification and I suspect that this is still somewhere "over the horizon".
As far as I'm aware there is no DAW software available that supports MIDI 2, nor any devices actually on the high street that use the protocol.
A few early demonstrations of functionality have been seen by some.
(Anybody knowing different please post a contradiction.)

So, I suspect it might be a bit early to start a project unless it was to create a MIDI 2 functioning prototype of a keyboard controller, synthesiser or such like.
But I'm not on any of the committees nor work parties, just a moderator who tries to keep spam in check!

Contradictions welcome.
JohnG.

MIDI Association companies are hard at work making all this happen but it's a long process (I'm in several of the working groups). Essentially, the MIDI 2.0 core specs were completed and published in February of 2020 and various parties need to build transports and APIs on top of those.

None of this is to say you can't make a piece of MIDI 2.0 software today — you just won't be able to send those messages in a standard way.

My company has an unofficial guide for MIDI 2.0 developers here: https://imitone.com/discover-midi

Thanks John and Evan! I was hoping to get access to some of the developer tools I've seen in some of the videos explaining MIDI 2.0, such as Brett Porter's "MIDI 2.0 Scope" or Andrew Mee's "Midi 2.0 Workbench" or even some of the C++ classes I've heard mentioned. These all seem to be inaccessible to non-corporation MMA partners though so no luck for an aspiring student just yet!

The more I'm looking into it, the more I'm realizing I might be a year or so too early for a project of my scope, but I'm going to keep searching a bit longer, and I might get some other ideas. I will definitely browse the imitone wiki for a bit, it looks great 🙂 Thanks for that!

HI, Matthew --

Yep, the developer tools are still restricted to corporate members of the MIDI association. That was not a decision that I made, but I agree with it until such time as we can validate interoperability with real shipping products. There are parts of MIDI 2 that work over MIDI 1 transports with MIDI 1 System Exclusive messages(Capability Inquiry and Property Exchange) and you might be able to find something in there that's interesting to work with.

Note that Apple has shipped support for at least these parts of MIDI 2 in the version of CoreMidi that's part of the latest macOS, and I have my fingers x-ed that we'll see similar progress from Microsoft this year as well.

I have been trying to exchange information with some other programmers about using CoreMidi with MacOS. The documentation is hard to follow and all of the examples on line appear to be more than seven years old. Given the information here, can we just ignore the sections about MIDI 2.0 universal packets at this time? Does anyone know of any good examples on the internet that can enable somebody to write client software with a MIDI device? There is an Apple CoreAudio mailing list that includes CoreMIDI. (see Apple list server https://lists.apple.com) and I am hoping to have access to that list soon.

Both JUCE and AudioKit use CoreMidi for MIDI I/) on macOS/iOS, and come with full source for reference.

These look very interesting and I'm going to go through them. There is a book series called :"The Missing Manual" and it seems that a lot of the frameworks such as CoreMIDI are definitely missing.