[greghendershott]

My first lesson in this was the Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface. It had a "smart mode" which accepted timestamped buffers. It was great... if you wanted a sequencer with exactly the features it supported, like say only 8 tracks. It was well-intentioned, because PCs of that era were slow.

The MPU-401 also had a "dumb" a.k.a. "UART" mode. You had to do everything yourself... and therefore could do anything. It turned out that early PCs were fast enough -- especially because you could install raw interrupt service routines and DOS didn't get in the way. :)

As a sequencer/DAW creator, you really want the system to give you raw hardware buffers and zero latency -- or as close to that as it can -- and let you build what you need on top.

If a system is far from that, it's understandable and well-meaning to try to compensate with some pre-baked engine/framework. It might even meet some folks' needs. But....

[subwayclub]

IIRC games made pretty good use of MPU-401 intelligent mode to drive the MT-32 module. The first really elaborate game scoring work on the IBM platform came through the MT-32(Sierra picked it up and everyone else followed - it was a good target for composers but in practice most people heard the music on Adlib/SB), so I would consider it successful in that niche.

And on that note, what I think Web Audio tried to be was a drop-in kit for game engines. Getting the full functionality of Unreal into the browser motivated the requirement for audio processing. But the actual implementation was muddled from the start: basic audio playback remains challenging(try to stream a BGM loop instead of load+uncompress and discover to your woe that it's not going to loop gaplessly, even when the codec is designed to allow that.) and my hobby stab at an independent implementation ran out of gas when I tried to get their envelope model working. The spec has a lot of features but not enough detail, and my morale sank further when I looked at how Chrome did it(stateful pasta code). I got something half-working, put it aside and never came back.

OTOH I had also tried Mozilla's system. That was very simple, and I got a synth working in no time at all with decent performance and latency. Optimizing from that point would have been the way to do it, but something in browser vendor politics at that time led to it being dropped.

[CamperBob2]

IIRC games made pretty good use of MPU-401 intelligent mode to drive the MT-32 module

Very few games used the MPU-401's intelligent mode, actually. Never mind how I know, that was a long time ago...

[S_A_P]

Hopefully poster is ok with this, but this guy would know as he was one of the first DAWs for Windows. Cakewalk/Sonar.

[eclipxe]

Whoa, you made CakewalK! Thank you so much! Cakewalk inspired a lifelong love of music creation for me. You rock!

[romwell]

Off-topic, but thanks for Cakewalk! I got started making music on Cakewalk 5, and it's been a ride ever since.

[fit2rule]

How do you feel that MIDI is still with us today, and still prone to mis-use!? I mean, in the context of the original article, its quite clear that there is a deeper lesson to be learned .. especially when compared with a near-40 year old technology which is still in use today.

(If I could return to Cakewalk, I would. Wrote some of my best tracks with that little ISR of yours!)

[better_ra]

Goodness, going to join in the chorus. Cakewalk and Reason were some of my earliest forays into production, it's awesome that you made Cakewalk!