PApajko·Dec 21, 2023
In Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDIfeross
timidity
Shell2018–2023
feross / timidity
timidity
Play MIDI files in the browser w/ Web Audio, WebAssembly, and libtimidity
2Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
406GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Play MIDI files in the browser w/ Web Audio, WebAssembly, and libtimidity
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-08-09 00:19:39 UTC to 2023-12-21 18:21:12 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesNice work! I am working to improve the MIDI playback quality on my MIDI archive website, BitMidi (https://bitmidi.com), and I think this might help.
The main difficulty with a web-based MIDI player like BitMidi is that it's not feasible to force the user to wait for a 300+ MB SoundFont to download before starting in-browser playback. The current format I use ("patch" files) has a separate file for each instrument, so I can lazily load only the necessary instruments needed to play a single song. You can see the approach I use here: https://github.com/feross/timidity
Anyway, excellent work on this SoundFont!
In FatBoy SoundFontA bit more info about how BitMidi is built...
First step, I needed to build a MIDI player in JavaScript. At first, I was determinted to write one from scratch in JavaScript and use the Web Audio API to synthesize all the instruments in code. I thought this would yield the the smallest possible JavaScript file size.
However, I didn’t really have the audio engineering skills to pull this off. So ended up settling for an approach that uses SoundFonts, which are basically instrument voices or files that contain all the possible notes an instrument can play.
BitMidi uses the instrument voices from the General MIDI sound set released by FreePats.
Then I compiled the best MIDI player written in C (libtimidity) to WebAssembly using Emscripten. I put in lots of effort to optimize the built size and include the minimal amount of code. The result of
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my efforts are available in the npm package timidity (https://github.com/feross/timidity). It’s quite lightweight – just 34 KB of JavaScript and 23 KB of lazy-loaded WebAssembly, smaller than anything I’ve seen on any other site.
Then I put a frontend on it, so it’s easy to browse all the files. BitMidi uses all the best techniques that I know about to make it super fast and snappy. The site gets perfect 100s on all categories on Chrome’s Lighthouse Performance benchmark, which is extremely non-trivial in my experience.
I plan to ingest a lot more MIDI files in the future, from sources like the Geocities MIDI archive on the Internet Archive and elsewhere.
Thanks! I found WebAssembly to be a joy to use. I mainly interacted with Emscripten and it worked great. One thing is that by default it produces a bundle with more JS that you probably need if you just expect the code to run in the browser. You can see what build flags I used to make the built JS super small: https://github.com/feross/timidity/blob/master/tools/build.s...
Hope this helps!
In Show HN: BitMidi – Wayback machine for old-school MIDI filesHey HN, site author here! So, the context for this site is that I was reminiscing about the days of Geocities and Angelfire, back when the web was quirky and fun. I remembered how sites used to use the <bgsound> tag to include an autoplaying background MIDI file. Those files had such a nice, old-school aesthetic.
I wanted to hear some MIDIs, so I searched and found a .zip file with 100K+ MIDI files that someone posted to Reddit. I tried playing a few in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. and then realized that they've all dropped the <bgsound> tag. Even Quicktime and VLC couldn't play back the files.*
There were some websites that could convert MIDI to low-quality MP3, and technically Apple still offers Quicktime 7 for download which can play MIDI, but it wasn't easy or fun to do.
Some websites offered inline playback with Flash (but it was fl
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aky and hard to get working in Chrome), and the JS-based ones were missing many instruments or multi-MB Emscripten-compiled monstrosities!
I decided that I'd compile the best MIDI player written in C (libtimidity) to WebAssembly and put in lots of effort to optimize the bundle and include the minimal amount of code. The result of that is here: https://github.com/feross/timidity It's quite lightweight - just 34 KB of JavaScript and 23 KB of lazy-loaded WebAssembly.
Then I put a frontend on it, so it's easy to browse that .zip file's contents. And that's BitMidi.
I plan to ingest a lot more MIDI files in the future, perhaps from the Geocities MIDI archive on the Internet Archive.
Feedback welcome!
* I later learned that VLC can actually play most MIDIs and I just got unlucky with the few I tried! That's okay though – I got to learn a lot about MIDI files, Emscripten, WebAssembly, and modern front-end web techniques. And I made a cool site too :)