IIRC - <bgsound> just forks off to Media Player, as *should* <object> and <audio>. I'm not totally sure what will happen in Metro browsing, where they shut down a lot of extensibility points. That's what I meant about other browsers - all the other major browsers ship on OSX (and many on Linux, etc), where they couldn't rely on an SMF/GM component being available. Android does ship with SMF playback, and the Sonivox synthesizer; however, they don't currently have it exposed with any MIDI APIs, only file-playback. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=8201. On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Tom White (MMA) <lists@midi.org> wrote: > ** > One more thing, just to help clarify the issues: > > ------------------------------ > *From:* Chris Wilson [mailto:cwilso@google.com] > > >>IE at least supports playing MIDI files via <bgsound> element > > There is absolutely nothing preventing browsers from implementing support > for .MID files in <audio> (and wasn't anything preventing them from using > <object>, either - in fact, I think this works on Windows machines). IE > would be a natural candidate to do this first, since they ONLY ship on > platforms that are known to have an installed GM synth (as per Tom's mail). > > > I think IE plays SMF in a browser because not only does Windows ship with > a MIDI renderer (MS GS Synth) but it also ships with an SMF player > (wmplayer.exe has been able to play SMF as far back as 1990). > > I suspect other browsers could use the same tools (on Windows) if they > wanted to, but there's no SMF player built into OSX, and the one in QT is > gone now, so browsers on Macs would need to contain their own SMF player... > not impossible, but certainly more work than browsers on PCs. > > BTW, I believe Android OS comes with an SMF player and GM synth, too. > > - TW >
Received on Thursday, 2 February 2012 17:45:36 UTC