Play .mid files in Chrome on Mac

Question

e.g. Wikipedia pages like this contain music samples in MIDI format. At present I have to download them then play them in some other player. I'm researching how to get these to play directly in Chrome without having to hassle with another app. Is this doable?

Answer 1

In fact: No there isn't a known way to play them directly in the browser on a mac. There might be a possibility to play it on a linux system in a browser like firefox with wrappers. There is a good thread at reddit which took a look at this problem:

• While MIDI is a relatively well defined format, it does not define how the music should be played. On old sound cards there was an FM chip that generated the synthetic sounds we all know and love. On Linux, you can use Timidity+ together with a soundfont to play sounds of a much higher quality, but at the cost of CPU and memory usage. Some people just wants to hear some blips while others want the Cello to actually sound like a Cello and route it through their robotic Cello player that they have in their livingroom, and the rest through their hand crafted external analog synth module. In short: it's hard for browser developers to come up with a way of generating the sounds in a way that everyone will accept. In my opinion, something sounding like FM generated sounds should be the default, instead of just silence.

• On Linux, it's relatively easy to play MIDI files with Timidity+ or a front end like KMIDI. I'm not entirely sure, but I think KMIDI or one of the other media player frontends can both be embedded and play midi files. I bet ffmpeg can do it. I assume you're using a Linux distribution, since it's not mentioned in the text.

The Reddit-Thread

The only known way to play the MIDI-files is to download the files and play it with a local player like vlc.