The good news, anorexic as it may be, is that the TRS MIDI debacle is not intractable. It is a mess produced by institutional passivity and manufacturer individualism, and those are forces that can be reversed through institutional assertiveness and manufacturer coordination, which are incidentally precisely the forces that created MIDI’s original success. Here are some thoughts on what a strict, time-bounded remediation by the MIDI Association and the corresponding manufacturers who caused this problem could pursue. They certainly owe it to their users to find some sort of resolution.
The first and most immediately actionable step is a comprehensive mandatory labeling standard. The MIDI Association must immediately amend RP-054 to require that any device shipping with a TRS MIDI port at any physical size display the type designation directly on the device panel, adjacent to the port, in a standardized format. “MIDI A” and “MIDI B” must appear as physical legends, not buried in a manual or specified only on a product page.
The 2.5-millimeter physical variant must be formally deprecated from any further MIDI Association endorsment. This step costs manufacturers nothing in engineering terms and requires only the will to enforce it. Any member of the MIDI Association shipping a new product without compliant labeling should face removal from the organization’s certification program.
The second step requires the major manufacturers, specifically Korg, Arturia, Novation, Roland, Akai, and IK Multimedia, to convene under the MIDI Association’s facilitation and issue a unified public commitment to Type A exclusivity on all new products going forward, with a hard sunset date for any new Type B designs no later than the end of 2026.
Novation has already demonstrated that this is feasible: beginning with the Launchkey Mini MK3, the company quietly shifted its entire new product line from Type B to Type A without disrupting its product roadmap. Arturia, Polyend and others must follow. The remaining holdouts must commit publicly and visibly, with the MIDI Association publishing a regularly updated conformance register on midi.org that consumers can reference before purchasing.
Third, the MIDI Association must fund and standardize a universal hardware adapter specification. Not merely a wiring diagram in a technical document available only to members who pay an association fee, but a royalty-free, open reference design for a Type A-to-Type B bidirectional adapter that any manufacturer or third party can produce to a guaranteed specification. The current market of Type A and Type B adapters is already substantial, but it is unregulated. Adapters of uncertain quality and unclear labeling are widely available, and their proliferation contributes to the confusion rather than resolving it. A standardized, MIDI Association-approved adapter, clearly labeled, with a consistent form factor and color coding, would immediately address the installed base of existing Type B devices without requiring users to throw away working hardware.
A software solution that 1010music initially developed, allowed the user to switch from Type B to Type A, and vice versa, in the operating system settings. This approach, which may be implemented in a firmware update, could alleviate this substantial pain point with an elegant solution.
