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Developers & MIDI 2.0 Specifications
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Why would JSON chosen for parameter exchange?
It seems that a standard such as CBOR (RFC 7049) would have been a better choice for several reasons:
- It's binary, so rather than having to base64-encode binary data for things like PCM samples to send to samplers, we could just send the data
- It's has very broad support, with implementations on most any language, just like JSON
- It's streamable
- It supports all the types JSON supports, and then some
- The type system is extensible, so types relevant to MIDI could be easily added
- It requires less CPU and memory to deal with, as parsing is simple.
Posted : 28/02/2020 9:12 am
Thanks for the question.
JSON was chosen for a number of reasons
- it's mainly 7 bit. There is a requirement to transfer the data over midi 1.0 SysEx messages which only allow 7bit. JSON has mechanism for handling utf16 values in 7 bit.
- it's human readable. It was important to have a format that could be read easily in a text format
- the eco system. JSON is very well known and it is recognisable to developers
If I understand CBOR correctly, CBOR has the same issue as msgpack in that it is an 8bit format. Future designs could perhaps make use of these technologies, if so decided ?
I hope that helps?
Andrew
Posted : 28/02/2020 2:38 pm
