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Comment by ssalazar | Hacker News Reader

Ha, great to see ChucK on here again! I'm one of the early developers of ChucK along with its creators, Ge Wang and Perry Cook. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.

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I use ChucK all the time since forever. And in completely different contexts. Generating blips for UI handlers or random audio data to test an FFT implementation. It really is the easiest music programming language to grok, and the built in concurrency primitives are awesome ;)

I wonder if its possible today to port the RTAudio lib ChucK is based on to the Web Audio API. Can we possibly see a ChucK.js for use in browser?

> I wonder if its possible today to port the RTAudio lib ChucK is based on to the Web Audio API. Can we possibly see a ChucK.js for use in browser?

This is in fact underway! Jack Atherton has been working on this though I am not certain of its current progress. Its certainly a lot more practical now with AudioWorklet now being available in all major browsers.

I have been waiting for the audio equivalent to svg for pictures for an eternity now, why has nobody made a synth sound addition to midi?

That sounds like a neat idea. Reminds me on SoundFont.

But isn't Midi the equivalent to SVG, Wave the equivalent to BMP, Flac to PNG and MP3 the one to JPEG?

> But isn't Midi the equivalent to SVG

MIDI (1.0) is more equivalent to NES/GameBoy-style sprites. It was designed almost exclusively with piano-like keyboard controllers in mind, suffers from a lot of 80's-era hardware limitations, heavily biased towards western music, relies completely on the sound bank for actual rendering (you can't even set your own pixels on a sprite - you can only say "paint a Mario here"), relies in some places on vendor-specific extensions, overall really it hasn't aged as nicely as say TCP.

A true "SVG, but for music" kind of equivalent would be an insanely interesting and challenging project. I'm not even sure if it should strive for more of a middle ground (so it can gain widespread adoption), or for flexibility (so it doesn't constrain creativity and allows expressiveness).

Also check out: MIDI 2.0, OSC.

MIDI is more analogous to a coloring book than SVG

Last I checked that's what people told me I was looking for, but when I tried to find some implementation that worked with .js I was stumped...

csound? pd?

As mentioned, there are so many languages for music/synthesis. pd, csound, SuperCollider, max/msp.

I don't know how you can want this so bad an not run into these. I mean I had the csound book like 15-20 years ago.

Do you know if any of these have open-source projects?

Module file formats [0] have been around since the 80s, and they can kind of be thought of as MIDI files with sound samples embedded in them. You can get some very impressive sounding full-length tracks in only a few kilobytes.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file

Do you know if they have a .js implementation? Or some lightweight C one?

Are you asking for library recommendations for a simple standard used extensively for the last 35 years when there are already 6 libraries linked in the wikipedia page you were given?

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