generating MIDI in javascript

Question

I'd like to generate a sequence of MIDI notes in javascript and then play it. Many plugins support MIDI, but I'm not aware of any supporting "data:" URL. Generating MIDI content is not a big deal - but feeding this content into player is. Anyone knows how this can be done - if not in general, then at least for specific plugin like QuickTime?

Answer 1

Sounds like the easiest way would be passing the MIDI data to e.g. a PHP script which then returns the input. Then you can use "yourscript.php?your-midi-data" instead of "data:your-mini-data".

Answer 2

How does the player usually get data? If you can examine the headers and format of a working file, you can probably figure out how to tweak PHP to send the right headers and stuff. Do you have a working example that isn't generated by php?

Answer 3

Very neat problem. I've been working a lot lately with base64-encoded images and have regularly been using http://www.greywyvern.com/code/php/binary2base64 for image encoding. I just tried converting a MIDI file and putting the base64 text stream into an HTML and it played just fine in Firefox (which astonished me). Here's the code (with the Base64 stream removed for brevity):

<embed 
    autostart="true" 
    loop="false" 
    volume="100" 
    hidden="false" 
    src="data:audio/x-midi;base64,abc...."
></embed>

I'm not sure it's possible to go from a binary image to base64 in JS, but I suspect that going from MIDI might be. It's a start.