Apple Announces Native MIDI Support in iOS 4.2

According to Appleinsider, The first beta of iOS 4.2 adds support for the CoreMIDI framework to the operating system's application program interfaces. This could suggest that future applications would allow new avenues for musical creation, and could also allow physical MIDI instruments connectors.

MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is an industry standard that allows electronic music machines to synchronize and communicate. With an adapter, a device like an iPhone could theoretically create and record sounds from a MIDI instrument.

More information from Apple on CoreMIDI:

Here’s what Apple has to say about CoreMIDI:

In Mac OS X, Apple provides a new set of system services, so that applications and MIDI hardware can communicate in a single unified way, using a single API.

MIDI services, which are low level, provide high-performance access to MIDI hardware devices. There is a driver model in the MIDI world that “talks” directly to IOKit, so your application has a direct path from the MIDI services API to the hardware.

Using this driver model, third-party manufacturers can create driver plugins that talk to IOKit. Those can then be loaded and managed by a server, which applications talk to through the Core MIDI framework.

The CoreMIDI framework provides the client-side API that applications use to interface to MIDI devices.

The primary goal of MIDI services in Mac OS X is to have interoperability between applications and hardware, so that everyone is working to the same standard. Other goals include providing MIDI I/O with highly accurate timing, as required by professional applications. This means from a musical point of view being able to get a MIDI event into and out of the computer within one millisecond, i.e., to keep latency under one millisecond, and also to keep jitter –– i.e., the variations in I/O –– under 200 microseconds.

Another goal is to provide a single system-wide configuration, i.e., knowing what devices are present, and being able to assign names to those devices, manufacturer names, and what MIDI channels they’re receiving on and so on.

The MIDI services are designed as an extensible system. Toward that end, a device can have any number of properties attached to it. And a device manufacturer can publish their particular properties of their device.

Developers should be able to code apps with MIDI support, rather than having to support individual interfaces. CoreMIDI could also open up using the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit for connecting existing USB MIDI devices.

Developers are already starting to support MIDI hardware on iOS, with devices like the Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer interface, This trend is likely to explode, though, with CoreMIDI support.

It’s not clear yet how “baked” MIDI support will be in iOS 4.2. If you’re an iOS developer or if you’re testing the iOS 4.2 beta, let us know if you’ve done any MIDI testing yet.