My wife purchased a Baby Grand Player Piano, and much to my delight, it included MIDI Out and In connections. Further, I inherited a PC from my father where he had accumulated over 170,000 MIDI files from varying genres.
Thus commenced my challenge: to find (or create) a MIDI Jukebox application to navigate through the thousands of MIDI files, enable rating, remote management, and display any metadata that could help me sort and filter through them all. I found a few small apps that were file and folder-based, but none that gave a comprehensive Jukebox experience with customizable Playlists, a queue, and the ability to rate songs as they were played (some of the MIDI songs just didn't fit my taste for the Piano).
And since .NET 8 released with more Blazor features, I knew the time was nigh to craft a Jukebox solution myself, where I could run on an old laptop, and use a (now wireless via Bluetooth) USB MIDI adapter into the piano. The laptop serves as a dedicated web server that runs on the Windows device connected to the Piano.
I first evaluated MIDI NuGet packages with LINQPad--to read through the MIDI files and iventory them into a LiteDB document database. Then play the MIDI files through Windows' sequencer, and switchable to the Bluetooth MIDI adapter to the piano.
Here are the major technologies for the solution:
- .NET 8
- ASP.NET Core 8
- Blazor (server-side)
- MudBlazor Material UI Components
- LiteDB Document Database
- Managed MIDI for MIDI-file reading, parsing, playing