MIDI Console Using Web MIDI API

22 Nov 2015

[Update, Jan 2017: Read about the updated version of Web MIDI console here. ]

I've wanted to check out the Web MIDI API for awhile, and after reading a nice post about it on the Keith McMillen blog I decided to put together a simple browser app (for Chrome) to display connected MIDI devices and messages sent from them.  It's similar in concept to MIDI monitor for OS X.

You can check out the app at factotumo.com/web-midi-console and the source code is available at GitHub.  The video below demonstrates usage of the console and shows MIDI sent from some of my hardware controllers using an iConnectMIDI4+ and Lemur on an iPhone using MusicIO.  Audio is provided by Helm, an open source synth by Matt Tytel.

Web MIDI Console is a single HTML page that uses JSRender for templating along with JQuery.  In a future update I may enable sending MIDI from the console via selecting an output and providing a user-defined function.  But as it is this should be useful for inspecting MIDI connections and messages on a local system directly from Chrome.