The MIDI Association and AMEI jointly released the MIDI-CI Profile for Piano (Version 1.0), together with its companion Implementation Guide.
It is a milestone years in the making: a shared, formally specified agreement for how a piano performance travels from one instrument to another and arrives with its musical intent intact.
The Profile standardizes a common velocity curve mapping musical dynamics — from pppp to ffff — to MIDI values, along with pedal behavior, tuning systems, and piano-specific characteristics, so a performance captured on one compliant instrument plays back as intended on another, whether an acoustic player piano, a digital piano, a software instrument, or a controller keyboard.
Just as notable as the specification is the company it keeps: competing manufacturers — including Yamaha, Steinway, Kawai, Roland, Korg, and Kurzweil — worked side by side to make it real.
About MIDI 2.0 Profiles:
New to this? A Profile is simply an agreed set of rules for how a device responds to a chosen set of MIDI messages, so that "the same messages mean the same thing" from one product to the next. Devices discover and turn on Profiles automatically through MIDI-CI, which removes the manual mapping and guesswork that used to stand between gear from different makers. Paired with MIDI 2.0’s higher-resolution, per-note expression, Profiles are what let a performance move between instruments and software with its detail and musical intent intact.
