Three hundred synths, three hardware projects, and one app

A crowd-built cheat sheet

It has been reported that MIDI Guide — the open, “comprehensive” MIDI CC & NRPN dataset — recently topped 300 instrument definitions. Surprise? Yes. Delightful? Absolutely. The milestone came when a first-time contributor submitted a pull request documenting the RozzBox One V2’s idiosyncratic CC map, and suddenly the community’s little reference had grown into something you could actually rely on. It has been reported that the dataset now lists 52 contributors, most strangers who somehow agreed on format and focus.

From backburner to release

Condukt, the iOS/iPadOS/macOS performance controller that sparked the project, only shipped in 2026 — seven years after its creator started cataloging MIDI behavior. Why the delay? The usual suspects: dongles, power bricks, niche hardware, and an App Store economy that wasn’t exactly welcoming to one-off music tools. The app was useful in practice but not marketable at scale, so the team parked it and kept the MIDI docs alive. The result: a machine-parsable, human-readable dataset that outlived its parent app.

Hardware and license

It has been reported that at least three real-world hardware devices now use the MIDI Guide dataset, which is published under CC-BY-SA 4.0 — free to use, remix, and ship. That’s the quiet, beautiful payoff of open tooling: people you’ll never meet fill in the gaps, and suddenly someone else’s spare-time obsession becomes infrastructure. Think of it as the internet’s version of a synth fair — minus the cramped rows and the one guy hawking vintage cables.

This is more than a reference dump. It’s a social artifact: a backburnered app, a handful of obsessive notes, and a community that turned those notes into something people can actually plug into their rigs. Want to discover a synth you’ve never heard of? There’s probably a CC map for it now.

Sources: midi.guide, Hacker News