🚀 go-pugleaf

> Aren't MIDI messages horrendously inefficient?  I seem to remember
> reading that normal note data, in order to be distinguishable from
> control messages, has to have the eighth bit turned off.  But the
> data is still logically grouped in eight-bit chunks, so you get
> something like this:
> 
> 0000xxxx
> 0000yyyy

No, note data is mostly 7 bits.  (Some other data, like bender values,
are 14 bits.)  For example, pitch and velocity both have range 0-127. 
So for most information, you're only "wasting" one bit in eight. 
Four-bit nibbles are used for status code (eight values, all with high
bit set) and channel numbers (a grossly inadequate sixteen).  And these
always share a byte, so it's pretty efficient on the whole.