You can hook your MIDI keyboard up to a website with Firefox 108

Yeah but MIDI works for so much more than a piano. People use MIDI to program drum VSTs, guitar VSTs, entire orchestras, guzheng VSTs... basically anything musical.

That being said, it's serviceable but not great for a lot of these things, because originally it was meant just for keyboard-controlled synthesizers. The biggest flaw (IMO) is lack of standardization for individual instruments with more varied playing styles and articulations than the piano. As a basic example, for guitar VSTs, if you want to switch between sustain notes and palm mutes, you generally have to play an out-of-range note (a "keyswitch") to alter the articulation. However this keyswitch is different for Ample Sound, Shreddage, Native Instruments guitar libraries, etc. Similarly if you want to slide between notes, some VSTs just let you overlap the note while others make you use a slide keyswitch. Every VST has its own way of MIDI programming that isn't transferrable.

It's like switching between programming languages, except you're building a single program where it uses multiple languages at once in the same file and you have to remember if the current language syntax you're writing uses `elif`, `else if` or is LISP. (I have reference manuals for most VSTs I own bookmarked for this reason.)

The fact that MIDI continues to be used today is, more than anything, the result of "perfect is the enemy of done" IMO. You could redesign something better than MIDI from the ground up, but since everything already supports MIDI there's little motivation when it already works well enough.

Specifically, the rate was 31250 bps. Why? Because the huge majority of synthesizer processors at the time had clocks that ran at 1 MHz or integer multiples thereof. Indeed that is still the case forty years later. Ask yourself what 31250 * 32 is.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/

Basically there are loads of different railway gauges around the world, and indeed, inside the USA itself, which historically had no single standard size.

All roads, railways, and thus tunnels and bridges everywhere are very approximately multiples of the width of a horse's pectoral/pelvic girdles. Nothing especially Roman or anything else about it.

[1] - http://www.dmx-512.com/dmx-protocol/dmx-protocol-basics/

Firmware over midi was not uncommon for older equipment because the alternative was swapping out EPROMs if the instrument did not have an FD drive…and around Y2K, unavailability of older chips could mean replacing sockets or going without (so mostly going without).

That is definitely an issue with the device, but I don’t know how common or uncommon that is for much older equipment

They're also often exceptional deals for the low end of laptops (sub 200 dollar range) because Windows and its bloat make those laptops even worse to use. I'd never recommend any laptop that cheap unless someone has no meaningful way to save up, but this segment is very much still alive.

Honestly, I'm surprised the unification of smartphone and laptop hasn't reached those circles yet. A mid range phone and a cheap laptop shell that you can slide the phone into are a much better deal than a cheap laptop and a cheap phone. Samsung's DeX, for example, is fully competitive with ChromeOS and even most basic Windows use cases.

Do you actually believe this? Do you not default to more practical explinations like, maybe they don't consider it worthwhile to support because of engineering cost vs people that actually use it?

For example, I'd say 9/10 people I know who aren't tech literate have no idea the Health app exists on their iPhone. This includes people with Apple watches. Similarly it should be obvious that basically nobody ever knew about or used that one feature you liked.

i don't understand how this is a fingerprinting risk either, and i'm pretty sure i'm not missing anything.

Marketing is tricky, but 2023 looks like a great year for my product.

Working hard for it :) nice to see these kind of talks, it's inspiring

My workflows for making them:

- either painstakingly transcribe a piece note-for note using midieditor

or

- find a youtube video of a good rendition

- download as MP3

- convert to midi using https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/

(I wrote my own software for this step but Piano Scribe is about 8% better even if it is slower so I use that now)

- fix up the output using midieditor

(still takes a lot of time, but it's quicker than starting from nothing)

This even works well when you have no score.

Best of luck! If you have a problematic file drop me an email.

I don't even have to write the css, I can just use https://github.com/ranmaru22/firefox-vertical-tabs, but in Edge, I can just select the option... not install an extension, click things in a hidden page, make a directory deep in $APPDATA, put a CSS file in that directory, and then also paste more CSS into said extension's custom CSS field, then restart browser.