duncte123 / launchpad.js

A javascript api to control your Novation launchpads
https://www.npmjs.com/package/launchpad.js
GNU General Public License v3.0
18 stars 5 forks source link

Feature: WebMidi support for browsers #11

Open iplanwebsites opened 1 week ago

iplanwebsites commented 1 week ago

Great lib! WebMidi is pretty well supported now. Would be great to allow this library to run either in the browser or NodeJs. This could be done by specifying an adapter during setup.

duncte123 commented 1 week ago

What would be the specific use case for this? Because it seems like a lot of work for something that could just be a nodejs app instead

iplanwebsites commented 1 week ago

Barrier to entry to web is just much lower that installing an app :)

Running in a browser would enable a whole new sets of use cases. For example:

Communication with the midi ports seems pretty isolated in utils.jsbut I haven't dig in the details.

duncte123 commented 1 week ago

Barrier to entry to web is just much lower that installing an app

I personally do not see that as a good reason, if people don't want to install software it's their problem, not the developer's. I also think that synthesia is the wrong example here, as they do require you to install software. And triggering chrome extensions (what about firefox users?) from a launchpad requires those extensions to support a way of communication in the first place, at that point it just becomes hotkeys with extra steps. The animation concept is neat, but I think that a native (not electron etc) application would be more beneficial here. I feel like nodejs would be the bottleneck when it comes to playback framerate. If I would write an animation tool for launchpads I would pick a language like Go or Java, probably Go since it does not require a runtime/translation layer like the JVM.

While the idea is novel, support for web-browsers is not something that I am interested in maintaining myself. If other people want to implement it that's fine with me tho. This repo accepts hacktoberfest PRs so go wild