Because Firefox has basically stopped all plugins from working except Flash since version 52 and workarounds failing with version 55 (ugh..), none of my DVD and Blu-ray pages that have an embedded MIDI player using the Microsoft’s Windows Media Player plugin work any longer. So, I decided to record MP3 versions of them which can be played using a standard HTML5 <audio>
tag that all modern browsers support.
Originally, I used Cool Edit 2000 which I’ve had a licensed copy of for some time. I recorded The Best of Benny Hill theme using it. Since then, I’ve been using Audacity to record the audio while using XMPlay to play the MIDI file. I then exported the audio as a MP3 using the Lame library. I used the Extreme quality preset during the export. So, now on pages like Star Wars IV: A New Hope, there’s a MP3 player as well. Since I’m using the MediaElements.js HTML5 video player on these pages, I decided to their MP3 player also.
Now I need to figure out what I’m going to do with my General MIDI page, if anything. Hmmm… 😖 For now, at least, the Windows Media Player plugin still works in Firefox ESR 52.