I love Fire Fight! I got the demo on a PC Gamer disc when I was a kid and played it forever. And couple of years ago when I built a retro PC, it was one of the first games I loaded up :)

If you’re curious about synths, I’d actually say it’s better to start with an instrument that’s standalone (that is, doesn’t need a MIDI controller). The HiChord is a good choice. I’ve personally had lots of fun with Orchid by Telepathic Instruments. And anything with a keyboard by KORG (including the VERY affordable volca line) is also a great starting point.

Once your first synth starts making sense, you’ll get the itch to buy a second, and it’ll be time to delve into MIDI :)

Ha. The Orchid was the first instrument I clicked on (in the Jamuary section) when I was trying to answer my own question.

Thank you for the recommendations. You're half way to a logicalincrements.com (I assume there's natural pairings between all these devices? it always looks like an array of devices cabled together.)

Hah! I hope it's worth the expense. Check out the Condukt discord when you get it going, lots happening in there.

That's an interesting idea. We've had a couple of requests to expand the format to include a mapping function between the CC/NRPN values and the 'display' values, e.g. [0, 127] -> [-10, 10], for cases where the relationship is nonlinear. This wouldn't guarantee normalization of meaning (it wouldn't encode the difference between the SH-101's attack and the Bass Station 2's attack), but it would make it easier to pull everything together in an app.

This is my pet feature :) There are so many cool sequencers and controllers, all with their own idiosyncratic plaintext instrument definition formats. Making little exporters for each of them is fun.

Hey thanks. I love the MIDI standard for exactly this reason too. Blows my mind that you can hook a forty year old synth up to a computer or iPad without drivers.

Synth nerds got it right: open specs, and a general industry-wide desire to make things play well together. After all, its music, this is why music works in the first place..

Totally, and I think the need for MIDI Guide - the fact that MIDI CC/NRPN is pretty much a free-for-all - is also why the spec has such staying power. It's so unopinionated that it imposes essentially zero constraints beyond message size. I love it.

Thanks! My daughter loved it too. I tried to design the sharing workflow so that kids could send their designs to friends with printers (that's why I stuffed all the state into the query string). I struggled with the name, WordCAD sounds so stodgy to me, but the kids I talked to thought it was cool and serious haha

Dev here - we already have a developer membership from our other (monetized) apps, so releasing this doesn't cost us any additional money.

That’s right, scans don’t appear in Photos. You can delete pages or scans with the usual iPhone controls (swipe left to show the Delete button, etc.)

I have the same problem with my “blinds” - I started calling them “shades” instead (not the usual term, in my vernacular at least) and have had much better luck. YMMV!