The Lost Art of MIDI – Bringing < bgsound> Back to the Web
summary
Recreates background MIDI playback by compiling a C MIDI engine to WebAssembly + Emscripten, using Web Audio to stream decoded PCM and a web component to resurrect the deprecated bgsound tag. Implements lazy instrument loading (fetch only instruments referenced by a file) to avoid 100 MB payloads. Ships a site hosting bitmidi with 100,000 MIDIs and reports ~10,000 daily views, demonstrating the player and web component work in modern browsers.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Start
- 0:44Keynote Speaker
- 3:45The Fog Cam
- 7:14The First Synthesizer To Support the Midi
- 8:40General Midi
- 9:52Midi Files
- 11:23Impossible Midi
- 17:23Pointers in Javascript
- 22:18Make a Web Component
- 30:32Call to Action
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