Re: [fluid-dev] Chrome Native Client

[David Henningsson]

On 11/12/2013 12:48 AM, Alexandre Roux Tekartik wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm interested in playing midi files/event from a web application in the
> chrome desktop application.
> As anyone considered compiling fluidsynth as a native Chrome extension?
> Does NaCl SDK ( https://developers.google.com/native-client/sdk/)
> contain everything needed to compile fluidsynth and route back the audio
> to the browser
> https://developers.google.com/native-client/devguide/coding/audio)?
> Could it be distributed as a Chrome extension with a nice sound font
> (FluidR3_GM.sf2), and with a proper polyfill in javascript to provide a
> stub for the Web MIDI API as it is done for the Jazzsoft plugin (
> http://cwilso.github.io/WebMIDIAPIShim/ - which unfortunately does not
> exist on Linux and sounds like using an older plugin technology)
> Even if the sound font is big, it would be only downloaded once in the
> extension and then all the web apps could take benefit of playing midi
> events in a consistent way (on Mac, win and linux) from Chrome/Chromium
> As a mobile developer, I'm not an expert in the fluidsynth architecture,
> but have good webaudio and software optimization knowledge. Is there any
> work in progress on that in which I could participate?
> Or even, is it just worth investigating?
> Thanks in advance
> --alex

In general, we have a lot of bindings to various drivers already, and I
think we're happy to add new drivers to FluidSynth as long as someone is
willing to maintain them.

As for the technical details, I'm not an expert on browsers and browser
technology, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work if someone can
figure out how to get the MIDI data from the SDK to fluidsynth.
Whether Chrome (and its underlying audio stack) would support low
latency scenarios might be a different matter though.

So far I believe you're the first asking for this, so I don't think
anyone else is already working on it.

// David