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I was trying to understand MIDI better, so that I know the difference between note messages, controller change messages (CC), and System Exclusive (SysEx). Ultimately my goal is to better understand and work with MIDI and MIDI devices in Cubase.

I ended up coming across references to Most Significant Byte (MSB) and Least Significant Byte (LSB), which seems related to Bit Numbering. However I’m seeing MSB referred to as Most Significant Byte (not Bit), and LSB referred to as Least Significant Byte (not Bit).

I tried to get an explanation to contextualize what this means in the context of MIDI controller change messages, but didn’t find much that was really clear, other than this article - Changing patches over MIDI using Bank Select Controller.

Explained

Here is how I would explain it to someone.

MIDI Limitations

When the MIDI specification was first developed, it wasn’t foreseen that anyone would need MIDI control change messages to have a value in a range greater than 0 - 127.

“Who would need more than 128 different patches/programs to choose from?” “Who would need a resolution of more than 128 for the instrument’s volume?”

By the way, MIDI refers to the different patches, or instruments, supported by a device as “programs”.

Because of this, MIDIs design does not allow you to send a value higher than 128 in a single message. Remember that 8 bits of binary can represent values 0 - 255, so MIDI limited values to 7 bits (0 - 127).

Overcoming the Limitations

When sound modules came out with more than 128 programs, manufacturers tried to overcome this limitation by organizing the programs into “banks”. By using a single Controller Change message to specify the bank, you could have 128 banks multiplied by 128 programs each, for a total of 16384 programs you can switch to.

“Who would need more than 16384 programs?”. At this point I think they didn’t want to limit systems again, so the MIDI specifications were updated to accomodate any future needs.

14 Bits of Resolution

This is where the MSB/LSB scheme comes in.

For situations where Control Change messages might need to specify a value with much higher resolution (more than 0 - 127), they decided to create pairs of messages that each would send a value between 0 - 127. Each value is 7 bits, for a combination of 14 bits, and thus a value range of 0 - 16383.

The first value, is called the Most Significant Byte (MSB). The second value, which is also 7 bits long, is called the Least Significant Byte (LSB). This terminology simply communicates that the first value is more significant than the second value in determining the ultimate value derrived from both combined.

If you actually look at the Control Change messages that are supported for selecting the Program Bank, Control Change message number 0 (‘CC#0’), is the “Bank Select MSB” value. Control Change message Number 32 (CC#32) is designated as the “Bank Select LSB” value.

This means that you can specify up to 16384 banks, each including 128 programs, for a total of 2,097,152 programs that can be specified by sending 3 messages:

• Bank Select MSB
• Bank Select LSB
• Program Change

Who could possibly need more than over 2 million program changes, right?

Other Control Changes

This story makes the most sense in terms of Banks and Program changes, but it also applies to other Control Changes. All the original control change messages designated for Modulation Wheel, Breath Controller, Foot Controller, Volume, Balance, Pan, etc. have equivalent “LSB” messages designated to increase the resolution of their values if needed.

You can see them all defined in MIDI 1.0 Control Change Messages (Data Bytes)

If you own a Subaru Outback or Legacy released in 2015 - 2018 that includes the Starlink system (the one without Apple Carplay), then you might not know that you can do the following cool things with a USB drive or SD card.

• View a slideshow of images
• Upload an image to display when you turn the “screen off”
• Sit back and watch videos while the car is parked (with parking break on)

I want to use a headless CMS with Jekyll as the source of my blog posts. There aren’t many plugins that aim to faciliate this.

There is a WordPress jekyll-import tool, but this is intended for a one time import of Wordpress content to Markdown files inside of your Jekyll project, not a continual build process that sources all content from an API.

I spent several days investigating an error that was coming up with our Rails application build using jRuby v9.3.3 - v9.3.10. Everytime the build would try to run bundle install we would get the following error.

I wanted to apply the robotic voice synthesis to Long-time nuclear waste warning messages.

Here’s a modified version of instructions provided by Yosei Ito. I used apt remove instead of apt uninstall.

The great thing about working with a framework like Ruby on Rails is how you can pick and choose the components that make up your application. Developers often have preferences concerning solutions or tools they use in their projects. They have the choice of testing tools such as Rspec or Cucumber, testing factory libraries such as FactoryBot or Fabrication, authentication solutions such as Devise or AuthLogic, and authorization solutions such as CanCan or Pundit.

Generating Characters

You can generate UTF-16 characters in ES6 using String.fromCharCode(), which takes one or more UTF-16 codes as input and returns the unicode character(s) specified.

// hex code input
let copyright = String.fromCodePoint(0x00A9);
// "©"

// decimal code input
let copyright = String.fromCodePoint(0169);
// "©"

Static Website Beginnings

I’ve maintained my own personal blog, and maintained websites for small businesses, since 2000. I started building websites by manually coding the files in HTML, and creating images I crafted in Photoshop. I’d update the website by uploading the files to the web hosting server using FTP. I later expanded on this by learning CSS and JavaScript. For the longest time I used Macromedia Dreamweaver (now owned by Adobe), because it was the closest thing to a web-standard compliant WYSIWYG editor, with a text/code editor that supported code coloring.

I’m working on an app that is meant to present a list of “steps” along a certain “path”. I tried to create a component called “path”, but this wasn’t allowed.

I got this error in the console.

vue.runtime.esm.js:638 [Vue warn]: Do not use built-in or reserved HTML elements as component id: path