Synthesia Web Application

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exoticpianoman
Posts: 4

Post by exoticpianoman »

Hi!

Quick intro, I'm a Software Engineering student who plays Jazz piano and makes Jazz piano Synthesia videos on YouTube.

I was wondering what you guys would think of an Online Synthesia version.
What I'm seeing is that a lot of people sometimes struggle with Synthesia videos on Youtube because of the speed and such.

My suggestion would be an Online Synthesia version of which the midi file CANNOT be downloaded (to prevent people from stealing our stuff) but provide them with more options to practice other than slowing the speed down on Youtube and have crappy sound as a result.

@Nicolas, I saw in a recent post that it's hard to give a release date of Synthesia 11 due to Operating System changes etc.
Wouldn't a web application be of help? as your not bound to native programming code like C++ which you have to deploy separately on windows and macOs.

EDIT: I actually mean something like MuseScore is doing online, but then of course better with Synthesia 😌

Curious to what you guys think. Thanks for reading!
exoticpianoman
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Instead of OSes breaking from under Synthesia, web browsers would change things out from under it! :lol:

The Web MIDI API still isn't available on most platforms. That's basically the end of the discussion, unfortunately. For a music player, sure. For an interactive piano practice tool, let's check that link again in another ten years. :? (You could argue "yeah, but Chrome is the browser and available everywhere" but you haven't had to answer twenty thousand emails from users that sometimes struggle to pick the right choice between two items in a menu. Giving the advice to "just download and install Chrome" is not a path I want to go down.)

Even then, I'm predisposed to native apps. Even with all the platform trouble (which is a more recent phenomenon). Building something on top of the Jenga tower that is a browser stack is kind of asking for trouble. Right now we don't control the (ever-changing) OS, but that's all. On a web stack, there are twenty more layers between the hardware and the user that you also don't control.

When Android didn't have MIDI support yet, I literally wrote a USB-MIDI driver from the spec. In the browser version of Synthesia, that conversation would have been "sorry, our hands are tied". I like not having my hands tied! :D

Synthesia supports this cool, accessible breath controller, again, by parsing raw USB HID packets. This is something you cannot do in a browser.
exoticpianoman
Posts: 4

Post by exoticpianoman »

Thank you for your elaboration!
I indeed forgot about people connecting their physical digital piano/keyboard to the computer or phone.
(You having to write your own driver because of Android back then man... respect 😭).

Also thanks for your quick answer and you're totally right about people and internet browsers.
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