Show HN: Cynthia – Reliably play MIDI music files – MIT / Portable / Windows

Cynthia uses whatever midi playback device you have on offer. By default that's "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth" on Windows, which is horrible to say the least. But if you install a 3rd party midi driver app like VirtualMIDISynth or OmniMIDI (see my other comment in this thread about soundfonts) you can upgrade sound playback to high quality using soundfonts (.sf2).

The app can also switch between up to 10 midi devices in realtime, or use them all simultaneously for playback - see main GUI, bottom right, Playback Device, 1 to 10 or "A" for all.

App supports General Midi 1 (GM1) over 16 channels in playback formats 0 and 1, but not 2. It does not support General Midi 2 (GM2) e.g. 32 channels, and does not support "system exclusive messages".

I never left pascal. Still code in an ancient Borland Delphi 3 Pro to this day - one slightly hefty license fee way back when for perpetual use was a bargain, unlike today's hefty fees. Still I love it's simplicity, crap-free interface, and blazing fast compilation times.

Have tried the modern community edition of Embarcadero Delphi a couple of times over the years, but found its layers on layers of source code and object inheritance complexity really shocking. I can only imagine the poor souls that have to maintain that mess.

Something like trying to ascertain simple logic pathways through their code in order to understand function limits or compatibility issues was a real nightmare/time consuming. Let alone attempting to predict or change core functionality.

And they did away with 8 bit ANSI strings, which were at times rather handy for some basic IO work and data processing. More than anything, you knew were you stood in your data at all times.

Another annoying thing was there bitmap handler, which required you to lock it in order to access it's internal pixels for data processing - think this was for compatibility with mobile chips - which from my basic observations did a full read and write (copy) of the image data - slowish. A simple binary data handler to mimic a system bitmap got right round that bottleneck.

Pascal! So that’s how the comment above about a “refreshing” lightness in code size was achieved.

It’s pretty consistent these days that when some indie / hobby app appears and is lightweight, there’s a very decent chance it’s Delphi, Free Pascal, or similar. A bit of a secret weapon in the Electron age.

Haven't used either of those apps myself directly, but from a few quick searches online they look to be doing the same job. It's probably a matter of settings - even when I had Qsynth and Jack running right, I had to go into Jack and align the audio streams etc and fiddle around a bit. Qsynth was a bit better, just had to get one midi device working and it was OK then.

Online is stating that PipeWire is now the default instead of PulseAudio or Jack. From my understanding they both sit on top of ALSA, the audio hardware driver.

So for things to go right you need: 1) Cynthia directed to playback through a working midi input device (she has a playback device range of 1-10, or "A" for all of them at once) 2) The midi input device is synthesised by FluidSynth which takes Cynthia's midi instructions and converts them into wave audio output 3) The wave audio output is directed to PipeWire/PulseAudio/Jack Audio 4) PipeWire/PulseAudio/Jack Audio ultimately direct it at your machine's hardware driver/handler, ALSA, which directs to your soundcard/sound chip and out to your speakers/headphones if all goes well.

I've read online that Jack is the pro option, which is why it was so complicated to do the basics, and PipeWire/PulseAudio are a little more user friendly?

If you switch Cynthia's Playback Device to "A" (bottom right of main GUI), she will play/broadcast her midi notes/instructions to all available midi input devices simultaneously, so if you have at least one midi input device producing sound, you should get something coming through to your speakers/headphones.

Unfortunately, I can't offer you much more help than this, as I'm not familiar with PipeWire/PulseAudio, and as far as I know FluidSynth was controlled behind the scenes (under the hood) by Qsynth's GUI.

I ended up playing the 3D Space Cadet theme song on YouTube.