Modules and instruments that use the 5 pin mini din connector generally don't supply drivers as anything that they might plug into would presumably already have the necessary hardware and drivers. Since the 5 pin midi connector was not standard on PC's, any PC that had one, would have also had the interface hardware and driver. And of course, another instrument with a 5 pin midi in would already be set up to receive midi data. I think though, the Atari 520ST computer did have midi in and out connectors.

The Roland GI-20 and GR-3 are more properly described as guitar to midi converters. "Interface" is not totally wrong though. It's a pretty general term.

And that's basically correct about the drivers. The driver takes care of all the little details that are specific to the particular device so that Windows has a standard way of communicating, controlling, etc, devices from different makers. The operating system (windows) then presents applications with a standard, uniform software interface to the device.

XP and other versions do have generic versions of drivers for some things, but I don't know if any had a generic driver for USB midi. If I'm not mistaken, midi capability was originally added to the game port to provide music and sound effects for games. This was when PC's only had maybe 4 megabytes memory. No room for wave files.

Also, the midi spec also required that the signals be electrically isolated between the transmitter and receiver. The signal at the 5 pin connector uses opto-isolators and a grounded shield that is only connected at the transmitting end. This was done to prevent ground loops as audio signals were often present in the same instument. That's why it could be impossible to detect if a midi instrument is connected. If it's not transmitting data, the midi connection looks like an open circuit.
An exception could be if the instrument were transmitting 'active sensing' bytes. In this case, there would be a steady stream of data.

By the way, what kinds of programming do you do?

Last edited by megafiddle; 07/18/12 07:30 PM.