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Comment by frankzander | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain to me, what's cool on web midi? I me for me it's totally useless. I have a lot of sequencer, synth and midi help plugins in the DAW ... what does a JS interface to the web offers other than the next 100th "I just wrote a little useless javascript music script"-show HN posts? For me it doesn't solve any problem or satisfy any need. It's just another other thing almost nobody uses in the browser.

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One use case is education, where a web app is often easiest to build and deploy.

There are lots of rooms equipped with computer, notation software and keyboard in music institutions, where webmidi seems like a great way to develop some quickie music theory/education apps.

The web is not anywhere near parity for music and audio production yet, but its proponents see webmidi as one necessary step to that direction.

(I would personally not use current webaudio/webmidi software, but have successfully deployed a lot of it for education!)

Ok fair point.

For example, online piano lessons/practice websites like Piano Marvel.

But is there a really need for that?

Yes, why not?

Because classical audio streaming does the work.

I would argue it also lowers the barrier to entry for experimenting with new techniques for generating/processing audio. For example, you could pretty quickly create a page that has touch controls for adjusting parameters, uses a neural network for generating MIDI data, and then outputs that MIDI to a VST running on your computer.

Web midi would be helpful to send signals to your audio software. I can imagine a web version of something like Touch OSC https://hexler.net/touchosc.

Does nobody do it because support's only just been added? Could it be the next step in collaborative remote music making?

Collaborative music making is IMHO more than pushing midi events around. And TBH this is nowadays fully possible but AFAIK not in real time.

It is fully possible, as I've built such app.

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

Well good luck with that. I doubt that you can beat 15ms line latency to at least 5ms ;-)

The way I've built my app, gets rid of latency altogether. Simply ceases to be an issue. It is a big bet, long road ahead of me

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