I have slowly been assembling the new PCBs over the past months. I'm just about halfway through the soldering now, and have started programming some of the new features.

There have been a couple of announcements around synths and MIDI lately. Tiptop Audio revealed their "ART" system which is similar to patch-able MIDI. That is a very interesting way to coordinate polyphony using multiple monophonic modules. With regular MIDI I think the best way would be to have one of the modules resend the data on different MIDI channels for each voice. Maybe I should make a converter module to connect ART and M2IDI someday.

There was also an update to the MIDI 2.0 spec. It added something called functional blocks, which give a new way to discover capabilities and negotiate MIDI 2.0. It also added two new message types: Flex data, which lets us send a sysex message to all devices in a group, and stream messages which are used for discovery of functional blocks. The utility messages have been changed to be group-less, so all devices should receive them regardless of their group. There really is a lot of programming ahead.