Public voting for the 2026 MIDI Innovation Awards closes at the end of today, 22 September. Voting opened on 8 September, and this year's field is 98 entries — a mix of shipping products and one-off prototypes, from established companies and from builders working alone or in pairs.
If you have been meaning to vote and haven't, the voting page is still open until the end of the day.
How the vote actually works
This is the part people routinely misunderstand, and it changes how much a single vote is worth.
The public vote does not pick the winners. It picks the finalists. Voting selects the three finalists in each category, and a judging panel then awards first, second and third place from those three. In other words, the public vote is the gate: it determines which projects the judges ever look at.
Entries are split across five categories:
- Software Prototypes / Non-Commercial Products
- Commercial Software Products
- Hardware Prototypes / Non-Commercial Products
- Commercial Hardware Products
- Artistic / Visual Project or Installation
You get three picks in each category, and a vote in one costs you nothing in any other. There is no reason to ration them. Each entry on the voting page links back to its full write-up on MIDI.org, with the entrant's own description, images and demo video, so it is possible to actually look at what you're backing rather than voting on name recognition.
The MIDI 2.0 category is the interesting one
Alongside the five main categories there is a MIDI 2.0 category, which 21 of this year's entries appear in. It works additively: an entry listed there is still competing in its own main category, so you can vote for it in both, and the MIDI 2.0 category has its own three picks.
For anyone tracking where per-note expression goes next, that category is unusually informative. There is no shortage of talk about MIDI 2.0 — property exchange, profiles, 32-bit resolution, per-note controllers — but relatively little visibility into what is being shipped on it. Twenty-one entries is the clearest snapshot available of what developers have actually built on the spec this year, rather than what they have announced intentions about.
That matters directly to MPE players. MPE and MIDI 2.0 are not competitors so much as overlapping answers to the same problem, and the split between them is already visible in the market: Image-Line has said FL Studio will pursue MIDI 2.0 per-note controllers rather than MPE, while most of the DAW field has gone the other way. Watching which approach the working prototypes choose is a reasonable leading indicator.
Why the awards are worth caring about
The MIDI Innovation Awards exist because the most interesting work in MIDI has never been concentrated in large companies. A striking number of this year's entries are the work of one or two people — a controller soldered together on a kitchen table, a plugin written to solve one person's specific problem, an installation built for a single room.
Those projects have no marketing budget and no press cycle. What they have is a visibility mechanism that only works if people use it. A vote for a two-person team genuinely moves the needle in a way that a vote for a large manufacturer does not, simply because the vote counts are small enough that it does.
It is also, for the expressive-instrument world specifically, one of the few places where hardware prototypes get looked at on equal footing with commercial releases. A good deal of what is now standard equipment in the MPE ecosystem started as exactly that kind of prototype.
What happens next
With voting closed, the three finalists per category go to the judging panel, which awards the placements. The winners announcement date has not yet been confirmed; in previous years the ceremony has been tied to industry events, so expect news in the run-up to the next major trade show cycle.
In the meantime, the full entry list on MIDI.org is worth browsing on its own merits, whether or not you vote. It is the closest thing the MIDI world has to an annual survey of what independent builders are working on — and historically, a decent number of the names on it turn up in product catalogues eighteen months later.
Vote before the deadline: voting.broadjam.com/vote/midi · Browse the entries: midi.org/innovation-awards