Show HN: Cynthia – Reliably play MIDI music files

Easy to use, portable app to play midi music files on all flavours of Microsoft Windows.

Brief Background - Used midi playback way back in the days of Windows 95 for some fun and entertaining apps, but as Windows progressed, it seemed their midi support (for Win32 anyway) regressed in both startup speed and reliability. Midi playback used to be near instant on Windows 95, but on later versions of Windows this was delayed to about 5-7 seconds. And reliability became somewhat patchy. This made working with midi a real headache.

Cynthia was built to test and enjoy midi music once again. It's taken over a year of solid coding, recoding, testing, re-testing, and a lot more testing, and some hair pulling along the way, but finally Cynthia works pretty solidly on Windows now.

Some of Cynthia's Key Features: * 25 built-in sample midis on a virtual disk - play right out-of-the box * Play Modes: Once, Repeat One, Repeat All, All Once, Random * Play ".mid", ".midi" and ".rmi" midi files in 0 and 1 formats * Realtime track data indicators, channel output volume indicators with peak hold, 128 note usage indicators * Volume Bars to display realtime average volume and bass volume levels * Use an Xbox Controller to control Cynthia's main functions * Large list capacity for handling thousands of midi files * Switch between up to 10 midi playback devices in realtime * Playback through a single midi device, or multiple simultaneous midi devices with lag and channel output support * Custom built midi playback engine for high playback stability * Custom built codebase for low-level work to GUI level * Also runs on Linux/Mac (including apple silicon) via Wine * Smart Source Code - compiles in Borland Delphi 3 and Lazarus 2 * MIT License

YouTube Video of Cynthia playing a midi: https://youtu.be/IDEOQUboTvQ

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/blaiz2023/Cynthia

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ale42 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the days of Electron bloatware, it's refreshing to see a program that is so light in terms of size. Unfortunately, at least on a 4K screen, the interface is a bit laggy and it uses a lot of CPU.

	▲	braebo 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A web app would have been cross platform (including just web), had a superior UI (in both speed and UX) — and with a less bloated Electron alternative like Tauri — better in just about every way that matters.

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luc_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Finally, don't have to remember the UMRN for Camptown Races anymore.

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xcf_seetan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It has a freepascal/lazarus project file, so it can be compiled for a lot of platforms, i don't about midi drivers on those platforms, so midi could not work or need more code.

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zahlman 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow, it's been a long time since I saw Pascal code.

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bitwize 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Feature suggestion: Optional OPL3 simulation, so that CANYON.MID can be heard as God intended.

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tosti 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Calling a program portable by virtue of wine being a thing defies logic. That said, nice work. Midi instrument input is on my wishlist.

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karmakaze 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There were companies that specialized in 'porting' games to Mac using/packaging Wine long ago. It was certainly effective in the Intel Mac days and newer CPUs can certainly run software that predates that well. Heck browsers can run OSes and games in JS/Wasm.

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SergiusHN 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Portable and cross-platform are not synonymous. Being developed with the Wine in mind and being a standalone app are two unrelated features.

https://www.blaizenterprises.com/cynthia.html#help--what-mak...

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internet2000 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, very nice app, but it's weird to target Windows as the primary OS.

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ale42 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe it's "portable" in the sense that it's just an executable to launch, with no installation needed? I don't think they claim it is multi-platform.

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6581 2 hours ago | parent [-]

"* Also runs on Linux/Mac (including apple silicon) via Wine *"

	▲	Krssst an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Their website makes their definition of portable very clear in "What makes a portable app special?". It's quite clear they mean more a (much) stricter variation of the "no installation" definition than the "easily buildable on other OS" definition. Though they do mention execution under translation environments as a requirement.

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ksherlock 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd guess approximately nobody does it, but with winelib you can do a native compile and link.

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jjmarr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wine MIDI doesn't work, so it's a big advantage.

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baal80spam 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Type: Desktop App (Standard Edition)

This is (pun intended) music to my ears!

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mock-possum an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

My first thought was “what’s wrong with foobar?”

Then I saw the instrument / note grid, and the keyboard UI - this looks fun!