MIDI is a magical lingua franca between, well, sort of everything. But that’s only if you get it connected. And then once you do have it connected, you might want to tame its messages so they accomplish what you want.
Now, the buzz is wearing off following last week’s avalanche of new music gear announcements. You might realize you don’t have $30,000 for a modular. But then, in the wake of that gear, comes one that flew under the radar – and it’s one of the most powerful-looking bits of kit we’ve seen recently.
For years, Bome’s Midi Translator has been the secret sauce used by drummers and beatboxers and other performers to make their MIDI gear perform amazing tricks. The software’s approach is simple – get messages in, do something to them, send messages out. But by providing an insanely powerful set of rule-based operations on those messages, it has been the one piece of software that solves your needs when others can’t.
And now it’s hardware.
Yes, the Bome Box is a device that loads up MIDI Translator Pro project files and does all these MIDI-mangling tricks without a computer required.
And more than that, it’s hardware that connects MIDI via whatever you want. In and out, of course, low latency, of course. But there’s also a USB host – necessary for all these USB devices that lack MIDI DIN ports. And there are two Ethernet ports, for long-distance network cabling of MIDI.
And there’s WiFi, too.
BomeBox is also the first hardware I’ve seen to advertise itself as HD-ready. No, we’re not talking televisions – we’re talking the next generation of MIDI. The MIDI makers are near to releasing the HD version of their protocol, which will happily make use of the added bandwidth of these connections with higher-resolution data (among other new features – more on that soon).
BomeBox is due in spring. No pricing yet.
I love boxes that solve problems – even if not terribly sexy problems. And BomeBox looks very intriguing, indeed. We’ll have an eye on this box.
http://www.bome.com/products/bomebox