[sdiy] ADDA & MIDI over Ethernet/Firewire?

[Tom May]

Magnus Danielson <cfmd at swipnet.se> writes:

> Anyone who still states that Ethernet or "IP" (we old farts say TCP/IP) is
> "simple" haven't looked at the stacks of specs they make. They are also not
> "simple" to fully comprehend and understand, and this is especially true when
> it comes to the issues which they are really bad at telling.

Then forget TCP.  As you said "Loss of a single real-time traffic
packet is a catastroph and you might as well give up after that since
you no longer is able to do anything usefull".  All of the
complication and gotchas of TCP is dealing with lost packets and
packets arriving out of order (ok, and a few other things you don't
care about for MIDI).  Spec the layers below the protocol so packets
(ethernet frames, UDP, whatever) will arrive, will arrive in order,
and will even arrive in a timely manner.  Call anything that violates
this broken, and fix, replace, or live with it.  Seems to me this is
pretty much how MIDI works now.

Tom.