Are you trying to do this in a modern browser? Or just having fun making a vintage website for use in old browsers? (I'll get to why I'm asking below)

MIDI playback is something that has been removed from basically all modern browsers as a stock feature. It was easily done in HTML in the past with e.g.:
<embed src="CANYON.MID" hidden="true" autostart="true" autoplay="true">

I just tested the above in Opera 9.64 & IE 5 on my win98 PC and the file plays. In modern Chrome and Firefox, it's just downloading a duplicate of the file and not playing at all.

You'll have to use a third party library to do it now such as midi.js --- so you'll be using javascript.. Be very wary of crypto miners being stashed away in such crap though. I'm not sure of any other easy way to do such a thing now.

Nothing current will support MIDI. MIDI is also a terrible idea for embedding, as there really is no common denominator for MIDI playback, except for the Microsoft / Roland GM software synthesizer, which really sucks anyway.

Everyone is using streamed digital audio now. Most browsers support either Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, MPEG-4 AAC, and/or MP3. The minimum suggested setup is to provide redundant files in both Ogg Vorbis and MPEG-4 AAC format, which will cover all of the browsers that do not support either one or the other.

Read up on the <audio> tag. It allows specifying multiple sources with different content types, and the browser will pick the first one it happens to support.

Netzero still exists, so there is still a dial up market out there. We don't even use our phone company anymore. Cox cable. I was wondering if background mid was any good for that.

Sure, but you may as well also be using a dial-up era computer and operating system and browser as well, as those are the only things which will support embedded MIDI. Of course, you may need to realize that people also hate sites with embedded music.

Maybe the web should be more low bandwidth friendly. I haven't seen studies.

Maybe it already is if you don’t embed media in every page. Also, remember that dialup users are in the minority.

Theoretically, when building motherboards, how much would it cost for a Roland RAP-10 chip on the motherboard? Because the problem with MIDI, is that it doesn't sound good without an upgrade to the motherboard or an upgrade to the operating system - a virtual sound canvas. So, to get BGM for low bandwidth connections, you need to increase the cost of the equipment.

Also, quicktime has a synthesizer with reverb built in, but it does not come with the computer.

What is the brand name on the IC for the SCC-1?

The RAP-10 came out later. All of a sudden I am wondering if the IC on the SSC-1 is Roland branded.

Regarding the cost of such a chip, I'm curious, as well.
On the other hand, official MPU-401 support -along with support for the Gameport- got years ago dropeed with Win Vista.
While it might be possible to fix that on 32-Bit Windows, 64-Bit releases would require another solution.
Maybe a cheap USB-MIDI conversion chip directly soldered onto the motherboard.

BeginnerGuy wrote:

MIDI playback is something that has been removed from basically all modern browsers as a stock feature. It was easily done in HTML in the past with e.g.:
<embed src="CANYON.MID" hidden="true" autostart="true" autoplay="true">

I just tested the above in Opera 9.64 & IE 5 on my win98 PC and the file plays. In modern Chrome and Firefox, it's just downloading a duplicate of the file and not playing at all.

Man, you're making me feel old. 😢
I took that for granted, I had no idea this standard feature got removed in the past years so silently..

Edit: Just checked. The "embed" tag still works in IE7, but not in FF ESR 52.6.0. 🙁
I also found some HTML5 tgas related to audio playback: http://xahlee.info/js/html5_audio.html

Edit: Another, alternate tag was "bgsound": <bgsound src="canyon.mid" loop="infinite">
Unfortunately, it doesnt work in current FF either, but in old IE7.
https://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/backg … oundmusic.shtml

Well, there could be the off chance that Crescendo will suddenly come back from the dead

A browser extension that's a local HTML5 midi renderer parsing embed tags is the only way I can imagine this happening again.

Maybe server side rendering to Opus/AAC?

I believe it is simply <EMBED SRC="canyon.mid" hidden=true autostart=true loop=1> for HTML... I used to use QuickTime for browser playback back in the day.

gdjacobs wrote:

Maybe server side rendering to Opus/AAC?

OP already said audio streaming is out, as they're targeting the dialup contingency.

kode54 wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Maybe server side rendering to Opus/AAC?

OP already said audio streaming is out, as they're targeting the dialup contingency.

Maybe something like this, then?

gdjacobs wrote:

kode54 wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Maybe server side rendering to Opus/AAC?

OP already said audio streaming is out, as they're targeting the dialup contingency.

Maybe something like this, then?

Well, yeah, low bitrate Opus could probably pass over dialup. But then you've still got to decode it. It requires considerably more processing power than MP3, but not that much more, since it uses less than 1% of a core on a modern processor.

How much intensive is Opus decoding, just using MMX alone?

Sorry, the link I meant to include didn't make it...
https://github.com/feross/timidity

Someone ported Timidity for use in the browser.