Olasson

To me, the takeaway is the strategy he used to start the business: "In the early 2000s, Topf began appearing outside German venues with a van, offering to pick up, wash and return the production’s clothes." Then after seeing the quality, artists/managers invited him to join tours. It's genius, simple but original and effective.

Also not surprised at the dirtiest crap ever being Slipknot's clothes. Their concerts were quite an experience. Not only is the show impressive (levitating drummers and all), but also the sheer synchronization and speed at which they play.

I want to believe this will get decent adoption in my lifetime. MIDI has so many historical limitations that have become ridiculous in a modern context, like only having 16 channels per bus or the very low control precision. These have lead to hacky solutions and compromises that often end up creating a poor experience for users.

I've worked on plugins that require per-note tuning and pitch bend, and the current best solution, MPE, is limiting. You're forced to use an entire MIDI bus to control a single instrument. This is a huge hack, and it means you can't create a MIDI plugin that controls multiple instruments.

Vendors are slow to adopt new standards in the audio world (as in many domains), and I hope this will be followed up with good diplomacy. We can learn from the non-adoption of Steinberg's VST3 standard as a path to avoid.