Show HN: BitMidi – Wayback machine for old-school MIDI files

Re:Show HN: BitMidi – Wayback machine for old-school MIDI files by feross on Friday September 07, 2018 @01:21AM (#17932055)

Okay, I stand corrected. I did a bunch of research, but I clearly missed some superior MIDI players. I'll take a look at FluidSynth-lite and see if there's some way to use it.

One issue I can already see is they use a SoundFont file (.sf2) instead of instrument patch files, which means the whole 100MB+ file probably needs to be loaded before playback. My current approach uses GUS patch files which have one file per instrument, so I can load just what's needed for a particular song and start playing much sooner.

Edit: It looks the GeneralUser SoundFont is only 31MB and it sounds almost as good as the 100MB+ one. So, while this will still be slower than my current approach of loading just the needed instruments, perhaps if I start loading it in the background with ServiceWorker and cache it forever, this could work. Thoughts welcome.

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Re:Show HN: BitMidi – Wayback machine for old-school MIDI files by SmellyGeekBoy on Friday September 07, 2018 @04:23AM (#17932690)

Perhaps give users the choice of which MIDI playback "engine" to use? It seems a shame to throw away all of your hard work (on the player) so far.

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