Re: Web Audio at NAMM

Hi Chris, Tom, Michael, Joe, All,

Wish I could come and talk to you in person at the NAMM conference, but 
I can't.
Here are a couple of things I'd like to say to the MMA in general.

First, I think you should be very excited about the forthcoming Web MIDI 
API. I really think its going to happen this time, and it ought to 
improve your sales considerably! I can see lots of people wanting to 
play MIDI devices via pocket computers. Note that -- two hands. Don't 
swipe, use MIDI!
Hopefully, a lot of them will actually be playing music.

Next, the latest news from my own project.
I've discovered that I can lift a lot of the code into a re-usable 
library for dealing with Standard MIDI Files and Sequences. The library 
is going to have an API containing the following objects:
     MIDIEvent -- wraps  the Web MIDI API's definition of a MIDIEvent
     MIDIMoment -- a collection of MIDIEvents having the same timestamp
     MIDISequence -- an Array of Arrays of MIDIMoment (there is no 
MIDITrack)
the functions
     SMFtoSequence(...)
     SequencetoSMF(...)
and
     MIDIConstants
plus a couple of utilities -- for converting 14-bit numbers etc.
This whole library can be thought of as a second layer under the Web 
MIDI API. I think its probably too big to be incorporated into the rest 
of the Web MIDI API, so it is (initially at least) going to become a 
publicly usable Javascript library. I'll be publishing it as a GitHub 
project as soon as the first version is working properly (hopefully in 
the coming week). At the moment I'm still stitching things together 
again after the operation...
Hopefully, once the library's API is sorted out and I have a first 
implementation running, I'll get some help from some programmers who are 
better at Javascript than I am, to optimise it.

And last, I have a bone to pick with the MMA: I think its about time you 
came out of the 1980s and published the definitive MIDI Standard as a 
free, readable, on-line book. One of the lessons of the past 40 years is 
that standards need to be public information. I've been using Jeff 
Glatt's book [1] for years. Its excellent, but not exactly official.
Should the MIDI Standard be moved into the W3C?

all the best,
James

[1] http://home.roadrunner.com/~jgglatt/

p.s. @Michael Good: I'm not sure if the email address I've got for you 
is public, so this is a blind copy.

-- 
www.james-ingram-act-two.de

Received on Friday, 18 January 2013 10:06:47 UTC