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How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

knob.monster

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#11
post #9

tangent/feedback about the product: replacing abandoned desktop apps with a webapp with unknown future does not exactly excite me. Bundle this as a desktop app that works offline-first and you'll pique more interest.

Strong disagree!

Zero install is a huge feature both to reduce friction and to save local storage. I don't want to install yet another synth I'll use twice a year.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#12
post #11
post #9

tangent/feedback about the product: replacing abandoned desktop apps with a webapp with unknown future does not exactly excite me. Bundle this as a desktop app that works offline-first and you'll pique more interest.

Strong disagree! Zero install is a huge feature both to reduce friction and to save local storage. I don't want to install yet another synth I'll use twice a year.

You can offer standalone exes without installers.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#14
post #6

I had the opposite problem where using my (recent-ish) cheap midi keyboard with WebMidi was crashing Firefox.

That's usually caused by cheap controller firmware flooding the connection with continuous Active Sensing signals (0xFE bytes every 300ms) or noisy clock jitter.

That's one way to look at it, but imo firefox shouldnt crash no matter how malformed the data is.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#15
post #11
post #9

tangent/feedback about the product: replacing abandoned desktop apps with a webapp with unknown future does not exactly excite me. Bundle this as a desktop app that works offline-first and you'll pique more interest.

Strong disagree! Zero install is a huge feature both to reduce friction and to save local storage. I don't want to install yet another synth I'll use twice a year.

Implementing in native code and compiling to WASM would make for a good compromise.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#16
post #11
post #9

tangent/feedback about the product: replacing abandoned desktop apps with a webapp with unknown future does not exactly excite me. Bundle this as a desktop app that works offline-first and you'll pique more interest.

Strong disagree! Zero install is a huge feature both to reduce friction and to save local storage. I don't want to install yet another synth I'll use twice a year.

Zero install and locally stored, as one HTML file, or as a web bundle.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#17
post #9

tangent/feedback about the product: replacing abandoned desktop apps with a webapp with unknown future does not exactly excite me. Bundle this as a desktop app that works offline-first and you'll pique more interest.

Yeah, and I'm certainly not paying $20 a month - indefinitely - for it.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#18
You don't have to go the 1980s to find equipment that can't keep up.

I have an older rev of a Digital Loggers web power switch, before they went to Linux.

In one lab setup at a previous job, I had to put it on a VLAN; broadcast traffic was killing its ethernet stack, making it hard to connect to its web UI.

Re: How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?

#20
In my experience the amount of buffering you get for USB MIDI seems to be highly variable. I've had incredibly frustrating problems with mysteriously vanishing commands with two different USB-MIDI adapters on macOS (to the point I would consider macOS unusable for MIDI, but since nobody else has ever complained about this it must be a quirk of the 2017 MacBook); on Windows, everything is always buffered properly; and then on Linux, it usually works, but then will randomly blow up.

Anyway, the æsthetic of this website trips my vibe-coding sense, though I might be oversensitised. I find that pretty depressing, because MIDI is a field of carefully designed resource-constrained systems, everything has been meticulously hand-crafted by generations of engineers and there is nothing so complex it would make sense to resort to AI. (Here's my own MIDI SysEx project that's all hand-written, by the way: https://hikari.noyu.me/etc/SoundPalette. Not trying to self-promote, I just wonder if it might be interesting.)

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