In response to magazine or online publications claiming that a new technology called "XMIDI" is poised to become a new standard for synthesizers, the MMA Technical Standards Board of Directors has released the following statement: 

We genuinely applaud the effort of the developer for attempting to make MIDI into a different and, in their eyes, better technology. However, despite some very clever engineering on the part of the developer, extensive review and discussion by the MMA's Technical Standards Board and many of our members indicates that XMIDI would create more problems than it would solve for the vast majority of current and future users of MIDI. What follows are four main reasons which have led to this conclusion:

1) MIDI is inexpensive and royalty free. These characteristics are considered vital to our membership and a prime reason for its acceptance and proliferation. A custom hardware solution from a single source would represent a 180 degree change in direction.

2) The non-orthogonality of the XMIDI interface makes it extremely difficult to write manageable software to parse it, and more importantly, to relate it to the user in an non-confusing manner. MIDI is now being evaluated for adoption in a number of high-volume markets where design simplicity is crucial. The Tech Board feels that introducing anything that risks increasing design difficulty and user confusion would compromise both the interests of the greater MMA membership and our customers.

3) The MIDI Specification is open for everyone to use. The requirement of secrecy agreements for each licensee of XMIDI is unacceptable. MIDI is based on the spirit of cooperation and consensus. Secrecy agreements would completely undermine this spirit.

4) The MMA membership has indicated many times that enhancements to MIDI should not increase the amount of data traffic on the 31.25 Kbaud serial line. In our opinion XMIDI would clearly increase traffic a great deal, adding to the current problems of MIDI response time with dense controller activity.

In conclusion, we once again express our interest in any effort to design a low cost, high speed MIDI alternative that would be royalty and copyright free. We believe a design with such characteristics would be warmly welcomed by the MMA membership. We do not believe that XMIDI meets these requirements.