MIDI 2.0 Specification Overview (M2-100-U)
The MIDI Association and AMEI (the Association of Musical Electronics Industry), document M2-100-U, version 1.1, published 15 June
2023 (v1.0 was 20 February 2020). Downloaded and read with pypdf, together with M2-104-UM, the
UMP Format & MIDI 2.0 Protocol specification, v1.1.2, dated 27 October 2023. T1 — the standard's
own text, published free by the bodies that write it.
The overview is short and does one job: it names the documents that are MIDI 2.0 and states the minimum a device must implement before it may claim the name.
Four documents plus this one
- MIDI Capability Inquiry (MIDI-CI) — M2-101-UM, v1.2
- Common Rules for MIDI-CI Profiles
- Common Rules for MIDI-CI Property Exchange
- Universal MIDI Packet (UMP) Format and MIDI 2.0 Protocol — M2-104-UM, v1.1.2
"None of these documents are stand-alone but are extensions of MIDI 1.0," and implementers "must have a thorough understanding of MIDI 1.0."
The two halves, and why they can ship separately
MIDI-CI is carried over System Exclusive, so it runs on any MIDI 1.0 transport — 5-pin DIN, USB MIDI 1.0, RTP, BLE, Web MIDI. It brings discovery, Profiles (a named set of message behaviours a receiver promises, with General MIDI given as the ancestor that lacked a reply channel), Property Exchange (get and set device properties as JSON over SysEx, so a DAW can build an editor for a device it has never met) and Process Inquiry (ask a device what state its messages are currently in).
The UMP format needs a MIDI 2.0 capable transport. It adds 16 Groups of 16 channels — 256 channels per connection — a Jitter Reduction timestamp that can be prepended to any message (16-bit ticks of 1/31250 s, about 32 µs, wrapping every 2.09712 s), System Exclusive 8 and Mixed Data Set for bulk transfer, and reserved space for future message types. The MIDI 2.0 Protocol raises Channel Voice resolution: 32-bit controllers, over 32,000 of them including per-note controllers, per-note pitch and articulation attributes on Note On, and combination messages aggregated into single atomic ones.
The compatibility clause is looser than the name suggests
A device claiming MIDI 2.0 must implement A or B, or both: MIDI-CI to its minimum (discovery mandatory) plus at least one of Profiles, Property Exchange or Process Inquiry; or the UMP data format to its minimum (endpoint discovery mandatory) plus at least one of MIDI 2.0 Channel Voice Messages, JR Timestamps, SysEx 8 or Mixed Data Set.
So two devices can both be "MIDI 2.0" and share nothing beyond MIDI 1.0: one implementing Profiles over a DIN cable, the other UMP over USB. The high-resolution protocol everyone associates with the name is in branch B, and branch A does not require it.