Do You Remember MIDI Music Files? (vice.com) 112
A new article at Motherboard remembers when the MIDI file format became the main way music was shared on the internet "for an incredibly short but memorable period of time..."
[I]n the hunt for additional features, the two primary developers of web browsers during the era -- Microsoft and Netscape -- added functionality that made audio files accessible when loading websites, whether as background music or as embedded files with a dedicated player. Either way, it was one of the earliest examples of a plug-in that much of the public ran into -- even before Flash. In particular, Microsoft's Internet Explorer supported it as far back as version 1.0, while Netscape Navigator supported it with the use of a plug-in and added native support starting in version 3.0. There was a period, during the peak of the Geocities era, where loading a website with a MIDI file was a common occurrence.
When Geocities was shut down in 2019, the MIDI files found on various websites during that time were collected by The Archive Team. The Internet Archive includes more than 51,000 files in The Geocities MIDI Collection. The list of songs, which can be seen here, is very much a time capsule to a specific era. Have a favorite song from 1998? Search for it in here, sans spaces, and you'll probably find it...! They sound like a musical time capsule, and evoke memories of a specific time for many web surfers of the era. "Even in an age of high-quality MP3s, the chintzy sounds of MIDI files resonate on the Web," writer Douglas Wolk wrote for Spin in 2000, immediately adding the reason: "They play on just about anything smarter than a Tupperware bowl, and they're also very small...." The thing that often gets lost with these compositions of popular songs done in MIDI format is that they're often done by people, either for purposes of running a sound bank (which might come in handy, for example, with karaoke), or by amateurs trying to recreate the songs they enjoy or heard on the radio.... [I]ts moment in the sun reflected its utility during a period of time when the demand for multimedia content from the internet was growing -- but the ability for computers to offer it up in a full-fat format was limited. (Stupid modems....) MIDI is very much not dead -- far from it. Its great strength is the fact that a MIDI-supporting iPad can communicate with some of the earliest MIDI-supporting devices, such as the Commodore 64.
Using a browser plugin called Jazz-Plugin, their writer even re-discovered John Roache's Ragtime MIDI Library. "[I]t occurred to me that I should spend more time writing about one of the things that makes the Web so special -- labors of love. Unlike any medium before it, the Web gives people with unusual talents and interests a chance to share their passions with fellow enthusiasts -- and with folks like me who just happen to drop by."
When Geocities was shut down in 2019, the MIDI files found on various websites during that time were collected by The Archive Team. The Internet Archive includes more than 51,000 files in The Geocities MIDI Collection. The list of songs, which can be seen here, is very much a time capsule to a specific era. Have a favorite song from 1998? Search for it in here, sans spaces, and you'll probably find it...! They sound like a musical time capsule, and evoke memories of a specific time for many web surfers of the era. "Even in an age of high-quality MP3s, the chintzy sounds of MIDI files resonate on the Web," writer Douglas Wolk wrote for Spin in 2000, immediately adding the reason: "They play on just about anything smarter than a Tupperware bowl, and they're also very small...." The thing that often gets lost with these compositions of popular songs done in MIDI format is that they're often done by people, either for purposes of running a sound bank (which might come in handy, for example, with karaoke), or by amateurs trying to recreate the songs they enjoy or heard on the radio.... [I]ts moment in the sun reflected its utility during a period of time when the demand for multimedia content from the internet was growing -- but the ability for computers to offer it up in a full-fat format was limited. (Stupid modems....) MIDI is very much not dead -- far from it. Its great strength is the fact that a MIDI-supporting iPad can communicate with some of the earliest MIDI-supporting devices, such as the Commodore 64.
Using a browser plugin called Jazz-Plugin, their writer even re-discovered John Roache's Ragtime MIDI Library. "[I]t occurred to me that I should spend more time writing about one of the things that makes the Web so special -- labors of love. Unlike any medium before it, the Web gives people with unusual talents and interests a chance to share their passions with fellow enthusiasts -- and with folks like me who just happen to drop by."
MODs (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that modtrackers were the shit rather than midi players.
Re: MODs (Score:1)
Re: MODs (Score:5, Informative)
All the initial MOD formats were 22 or 28kHz because the Amiga only had 28kHz audio — but it also had four channels (two on each stereo channel) so you could do fairly solid sound. That sounded a hell of a lot better than any MID on the hardware most people had in their PCs, which depended on low-grade FM synthesis to play back MIDs for a long time. Adlib, anyone? The original soundblaster had only one channel of 8-bit 23kHz PCM audio (in addition to 11-voice FM synthesis) which meant you needed a fairly ballsy PC to even play a MOD file (by downmixing to one channel), and MIDs sounded like garbage. It wasn't until well into the nineties that PCs got more than two channel audio, or wavetable MIDI.
Eurotrash was by far the most common kind of music made in the MOD format, because it was the popular electronic music of the day, but it was certainly possible to make other kinds of music. While it sounds a bit crap by modern standards, Klisje Paa Klisje [youtube.com] was one demotune which demonstrated that it was possible to carry off pretty much any non-lyrical musical style in a MOD.
Then there was Sonix, essentially a disk-streaming MOD format. It was possible to get tolerably good results with that even with songs with lyrics. With some effort, you could get repetitive songs onto a floppy...
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The best MIDI audio for PCs was only possible by connecting an external MIDI module like the Roland Sound Canvas or Yamaha XG. They used sampled instruments instead of FM synthesis. Even today an SC-88 sounds pretty good with a decent MIDI file.
If you check a selection of Amiga MODs they covered pretty much all generas of music, and some have lyrics.
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the gus could load the MT32 sound canvas and emulate it, sure midi files sounded better, but still nothing compared to (multichannel) mods.
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GUS was great, and GUS Max was even greater. I've owned both. But GUS cost a lot more than a SB, so they were far rarer.
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"Eurotrance", thank you very much. :-P
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"Eurotrance", thank you very much. :-P
That's a subgenre of trance, and arguably isn't even related to Eurotrash — cheap synthetic pop which sprang up after electronic synthesizers became inexpensive. Eurotrance is a much later development.
I do sometimes wonder how much Eurotrash was produced on Amigas. That would be an interesting statistic.
Re: MODs (Score:2)
Re:MODs (Score:5, Insightful)
God bless Winamp for still supporting MOD files. I still have a few from days gone by. This has sparked me to throw a few of my favorites into the playlist.
I still have respect for the tech that could encode what to most ears sounds like a full-featured 5-minute song in 750kB...
Re:MODs (Score:4, Interesting)
The MOD format was originally used on the Amiga and files produced for that platform are hard to play back properly on modern computers. The Amiga had a somewhat unusual 8 bit sound system that used a kind of PWM effect to control volume and produce different samples, and if you don't model it right the MODs don't sound right.
In fact I have yet to discover a modern MOD player that does sound just like an original Amiga 500 or 1200 (they had slightly different hardware).
Later on the format switched to 16 bit samples and more tracks for modern systems, but to me it lost the unique sound it had when the limitations were removed.
Re:MODs (Score:4, Informative)
I plugged my A1200 into an oscilloscope and was quite surprised to see the PWM effect in action. With the right samples playing, you can actually see what looks like a capacitor discharging, resulting in a sawtooth-looking waveform. If I remember correctly, this is noticable around 50KHz, roughly double the Amiga's max sample rate.
One of these days I'll get a better oscilloscope and look into this a bit closer.
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From memory it multiplexes channels around 50kHz and has megahertz range PWM for creating the analogue stuff. Volume control is yet more PWM at 50kHz.
Very clever stuff at the time, and it produced a unique sound that seemed better than you would expect from 8 bits.
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You need UADE [zakalwe.fi]. It gets faithful results the way SID players do...by emulating a headless Amiga. The source code contains dis-assembled Amiga machine code for the various tracker players. Some of my favorite mod's won't play correctly on anything else (except my real Amiga, of course, but she is getting rather rickety in her old age).
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UAE isn't 100% accurate either though. It's not bad but it's hard to emulate the analogue hardware accurately.
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You are correct! I'm going to give it a try, it sounds like they have made a great effort to make it accurate. I have some A500 and A1200 recordings to compare it to.
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It's under slow development it seems - as it's on GitLab and I'm pretty sure GitLab didn't really exist that much 10 years ago (GitHub might,
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To me, Winamp doesn't play MOD, S3M, IT, 669, XM, etc. correctly compared to ModPlug Player.
MODs vs. MIDI (Score:2)
The approach MIDI uses is mostly different than MOD. MIDI files are similar to sheet music (play/stop-play note timing info) with the names (ID#) of the instruments for each part: guitar, violin, bass, etc. How a given instrument sounds depends on the player's synthesizer, not really on the MIDI file itself. A better player (synthesizer) will make better sound. (MIDI can also encode subtle adjustments such as pitch bend and strength changes, although not all players recognize them, or interpret them differe
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wanted to comment on that, mod files were it, certainly on PC when soundcards became good enough (gus etc) that 16 or more channel mods became a thing.
all my friends bought records, i just listed to mods, there was some awesome music created.
midi files by comparison were pathetic.
My first "Axel Foley" download (Score:2)
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I remember thinking that was pretty cool in MIDI back in the 90s. Since it - of course - had no lyrics it sounded quite good on my 8 bit Soundblaster.
I did up JS Bach's Prelude from the 4 English suite in Cakewalk pro and played it back with a SB 32 awe and it sounded OK but not even as good as this old remix of a Sony recording of a real human from long ago... well at least to some less educated millennials. Gould was definitely not a digital machine gun but some were convinced that he is. a Bach Prelude in Fmajor [youtube.com] Interestingly that particular prelude seems to translate well in range if set in A major for two Classical guitars which is what I was aimin
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Axel F [wikipedia.org] sounded great in MID because it was relatively simple electronic music. It even sounded tolerably accurate in software MIDI on a Macintosh IIci, which is how I played it the first time... probably along with Popcorn [wikipedia.org]. :)
Remember? I still use it. (Score:5, Interesting)
While we don't typically send music in MIDI format out for public consumption anymore, or even use the MIDI file format (it was really first and foremost a protocol, not a file format), it's still an important foundation for how a lot of music is created internally by modern sequencers, even if it's buried rather deeply these days. We now have incredibly sophisticated sampled libraries - virtual orchestras, that use hundreds of GB of samples to replicate many nuances you could ask for of a real orchestra, or synthesizers that are thousands of times more powerful than standalone hardware of several decades ago.
It's sort of amusing, because the general public views MIDI music as "chinzy", but that's only a limitation of the quality of the sound banks you're using, as well as the format itself, which has a 16 channel limit. But when unleashed in a studio and paired with modern virtual instrument on high end audio workstations (no need for dedicated hardware anymore), it sounds pretty amazing.
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It does. Even remember when one could buy CDs full of MIDI music, not to mention all the other formats.
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Yes, I got myself a Soundblaster that had an add-on daughterboard card with wavetables (sorry, can't remember the model) in the mid-90's, and had downloaded some MIDI compositions of stuff like NIN, and they sounded surprisingly good. Fun times discovering all that!
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That was probably a SoundBlaster-16 then.
It's interesting to look back and consider how much extra hardware was required for very basic audio mixing and effects. These days, videogame audio engines do everything on the CPU, and even with all the requirements like decoding compressed samples on the fly, applying various effects, mixing many dozens of samples, etc.., it's still only requires a few percent of a couple of cores.
Digital music creation has also benefited from this as well. You used to require r
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Some of that's been moved to the GPU.
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Another poster reminded me, it was the Waveblaster. Old version of Cakewalk came with it too, fun fun!
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My girlfriend back in 1998 commented on some electronica I was listening to, saying it sounded like "MIDI music."
I tried to explain to her that MIDI doesn't have a sound of its own; the sound she was used to came out of an FM chip on her SoundBlaster card. She just knew that when she clicked on a ".mid" file link, it sounded chintzy.
I wish I was still in touch with her - I'd play her some "MIDI" music from my home studio gear, including old stuff like the JV-1080, E-Mu Proteus 2000, Kurzweil K2500, and Korg
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Might have been the WaveBlaster add-on. I had one of those too, and absolutely loved it.
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YES! That was it. Pretty big step for a consumer product, lots of fun sounds.
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And, of course, people forget that MIDI is how keyboards are connected. I remember before MIDI, during MIDI, and today with MIDI. I have had a dozen different MIDI keyboards- and even some that are quite old (25+ years) are fantastic, using sequenced sounds for hundreds of different instruments. They blew away anything computers with sound cards could do. Casio!!
In any case, I can take MIDI files, edit them in Rosegarden [now, used to be other programs], transpose them to any key, change tempo or whatev
A lot? More like ALL! (Score:3)
Tell me any piece of software in music production, thar doesn't process MIDI at some point ... And I will surprise you by telling you it uses MIDI internally. :)
The nice thing about it, is that like other pre-nutjob-generation protocols ... e.g. HTTP, SMTP, etc, it is extremely simple to implement, parse, generate, ignore unknown parts of, or extend, even with custom things.
So everyone chooses it whenever they can.
I used it even for mechatronic animated toys.
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Yes. If you need to move a song between two different sequencers, or you're doing this DAWless stuff and want to have a workstation or dedicated sequencer running everything, you're going to be exporting the song as a MIDI file because everything understands that.
Indeed (Score:1)
The same way... (Score:1)
... many older members remember dedicated servers, 2nd reality by Future crew, level edtiors in AAA games and screamtracker. The rise of the internet really changed nerd/hacker culture for the worse now that big companies have renegged on software ownership.
2nd reality demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Screamtracker:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
SNES SPC music:
https://www.zophar.net/music/n... [zophar.net]
Just the other day (Score:3)
I was clearing out one of the many junk folders on my server and found my cache of MIDI files. Played 'em with MUNT/foobar2000 using the Sound Canvas ROMs. Still kinda neat technology.
The most popular MIDI plugin IIR was Beatnik. They became some sort of phone technology when MP3s became more popular. Before MIDI they made a really cool generative music synthesizer plugin designed by Thomas Dolby.
MIDI for choral music (Score:2)
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"nerds singing in church choirs" I use MIDIs for exactly this. Sometimes I'll get the music from somewhere else, sometimes write the score using MuseScore (on Linux). I can vary the volume of the other voices to suit. Beats having to learn how to play the piano.
Sure do (Score:3)
https://muki.io/platform/nes [muki.io]
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*Have to hit the skip button to get it play when directly linked apparently...
I was a member of the MIDI assocation... (Score:2)
chiptune music was really good in pinball games (Score:2)
chiptune music was really good in pinball games
mid 80's to 90's
DCS games are good but they are not chiptune.
Alot of the BSMT 2000 powered games in the 90's and 00's
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DCS games are good but they are not chiptune.
Nor is their sound design as clever and organic as the earlier designs. Audio designer Chris Granner even said that the DCS board was one step forward and two steps back.
Black Knight 2000 was musical brilliance that almost no modern "high-quality" game audio system can truly re-create.
I'd like to see any modern-day instance of a sound system that literally holds the rest of the software captive until the right beat of the music: https://www.gamasutra.com/blog... [gamasutra.com]
A incredibly successful format... (Score:4, Interesting)
MIDI has aged extremely well. Granted MIDI 2.0 is on it's way, but if you look at the proposal right now, it's mainly about increasing precision.
I can use my XP-10 (from 1994) with the latest version of Ableton with not too much hassle. No dongles or adapters. The latest DJ controllers, pads, still use MIDI underneath it all.
In the older days, making a map of all the MIDI messages for a device to use in a DAW was a bit tricky. Now, all of them have learn functions, which makes it dead easy.
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MIDI has aged extremely well. Granted MIDI 2.0 is on it's way, but if you look at the proposal right now, it's mainly about increasing precision.
It's surprising how extensible MIDI has been. It's used it in a theatrical setting with MIDI Time Code and MIDI Show Control going all over the place. Makes life so much easier when trying to do tight light/sound/anything-else-non-safety-critical control.
MIDI files vs. MIDI implementations (Score:2)
For your personal entertainment or for work? (Score:2)
That said, the technology for personal entertainment was widely used in video-games as a full score can be put on a Floppy disk.
However for personal listening, it has been replaced by recording/waveform rendered formats (like
MIDI rules (Score:4, Informative)
As old and creaky as MIDI is, it's still the best control system for music. It's an absolute necessity for music production and performance. MIDI controllers operate all sorts of effects and production consoles and controls. Practically anyone who makes music today, even the most dedicated roots/folk purist, is going to encounter MIDI at some point in the process of producing music. I use it every day and nothing has come along yet to supplant it.
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And way down at the amateur end of the spectrum, MIDI files made by other people are an absolute godsend if you want to try to play a song from an old computer game you love. Open it up in any MIDI editor and voila, you have sheet music.
Well, it basically IS sheet music. (Score:2)
Just without the ambiguities that make rendering MIDI as actual sheet music a pain in the cunning linguals.
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If you're having problems turning MIDI into sheet music, you're using the wrong software. Try TuxGuitar or GuitarPro.
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Even better, I like MuseScore (which is free) for making excellent scores from MIDI files. You can even make guitar tablature (or other stringed instruments).
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Tuxguitar does this for free and has superior capabilities.
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MuseScore is also free for non-commercial use.
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Also, if you're learning an instrument, you can find MIDI backing tracks for just about any song. You can even transpose them as you like to play in your preferred key. Change tempo, whatever.
I'd given up on MIDI (Score:2)
Sidplayer (Score:1)
I remember a bunch of SIDPlayer songs for the C64 before I found MIDI later.
The things that people could do with three channels.
Some of the stereo ones that needed either a second SID chip, or a second C64 were even more impressive.
MIDI has no sound. (Score:2)
MIDI has no sound it's just data, when to start a note, when to stop, the velocity it's played and so on. MIDI file is for one track not multiple. For sound you need something that reads MIDI data and sends it to sound generator. Today MIDI is used a lot my musicians especially for film composers and HipHop artists because they are a lot of tools to edit MIDI and lots of instrument samples and virtual instruments to be the sounds the data is sent to. So MIDI is like source code it's nothing until se
Well, *theoretically* ... (Score:2)
... you can embed pretty much any data into MIDI via some special commands. A reason it is such long-lasting, basically universal controller protocol.
But your argument is still valid.
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" MIDI file is for one track not multiple." ...which is why my Korg N64 had 16 fucking track capability on it, riiiiiiight?
I remember but what I loved was MODs (Score:3)
I remember a software wavetable synth driver for Windows 3.1 and that really brought those MIDIs to life, but what I loved was MOD muaic (and S3Ms and all others). I loved downloading those from BBSes and listening to the great original music, and the cool demoscene compositions that were like nice realtime music videos that used personal computer hardware in impressive ways.
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I still have a stash with all my MODs, XMs, and of course The Cubic Player.
MIDI music was a huge part of gaming (Score:1)
Some of the finest game soundtracks ever made used MIDI files to work their magic.
Here's some examples:
Secret of Monkey Island [scummbar.com]
Final Fantasy 7 [khinsider.com]
Chrono Trigger [khinsider.com]
The amount of music within those tiny 5K-20K files was breath-taking. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, MIDI is very much alive and well in professional recording environments.
Buy that (Score:2)
Sheet music (Score:3)
For the longest time I thought MIDI sucked because it sounded like crap.
Really MIDI is just sheet music in electronic form. How good or bad (e.g. MS synth) it sounds depends entirely on the performance.
Have a collection of 110k MIDI files eating up some 3 GB of storage. Much larger collections are readily available online.
VirtualMIDISynth with about 4 GB of my favorite sound fonts loaded and MIDI files sound amazing some sound nearly identical to recordings of real life performances when the instrument mappings are not screwed up.
Re: 350 MB ðY link (Score:1)
I still use a MIDI ringtone (Score:3)
Been using it since the Nokia days. Good thing that Android kept MIDI support. (Well, I'm not sure if it still does, the latest Android version I had on a phone was 6.0, but that supported it. Hopefully it does. I'm used to that ringtone and it's unique, since I did some editing of the MIDI data.)
I remember (Score:2)
I remember Stevie Wonder once canceling a concert because he couldn't find his MIDI 3,5" Floppy he needed for the stage.
What do you mean "remember"? (Score:2, Interesting)
MIDI is still the standard music production protocol. You seem to assume it somehow went away because you only know things if they exist on the web. Just like you probably think Java is "that applet thing in browers".
Yes, your USB keyboard uses MIDI too.
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> Yes, your USB keyboard uses MIDI too.
Lol! For a second I thought you meant my USB Qwerty keyboard...that would be quite a trick. ^_^
I have a Casio WK-3800 that doesn't have standard MIDI ports (a real pain) and a USB connection. To use it with anything other than a computer would require some kind of interface, and because of USB's host/device architecture it can't be a simple converter box. Since the keyboard is so old there are no up-to-date drivers for it and it's essentially useless as a MIDI devic
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I remember in my uni days back around '87 or so, I took an electronic music class as an elective. We basically did your classic analog synth stuff to tape, but I remember learning that there was such a thing as MIDI over SCSI. It was apparently a thing because that 50K-ish bps data rate was slow enough that you couldn't do much before it affected timing, and this was 10 years before the debut of USB. It was also when SCSI was a relatively new thing in the consumer market with the Macintosh Plus.
But anyhow,
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You know what I mean. The host can send signals to the device and vice versa.
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MIDI is a super easy protocol to implement from a digital logic perspective. Most USB MIDI gadgets, before the block where it gets sent to the USB interface, you can piggyback the 3 pins you need and connect a DIN port.
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Thanks for the tip! Alas, the Casio is NOT class-compliant. :(
(p.s. that's another thing they should have addressed - any device using MIDI over USB must be usable without proprietary drivers!)
There's nothing to "remember" at all (Score:1)
There's nothing to remember because MIDI is still THE standard for music production. It's used in every single production studio on a planet (the ones worth their salt anyway) for transcription and rendering.
This is simply another myopic "if it's not on the web it doesn't exist" worldview of something that was around long before the web and will be around forever.
Michael Walthius STILL rocks! (Score:2)
web MIDI is so 2015 (Score:1)
https://www.w3.org/TR/webmidi/ [w3.org]
To some users, "MIDI" has become synonymous with Standard MIDI Files and General MIDI.
The Web MIDI API is not intended to describe music or controller inputs semantically; it is designed to expose the mechanics of MIDI input and output interfaces, and the practical aspects of sending and receiving MIDI messages, without identifying what those actions might mean semantically (e.g., in terms of "modulate the vibrato by 20Hz" or "play a G#7 chord", other than in terms of changing
Do I remember? I'm still using them now (Score:2)
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MIDI doesn't have a enough timing accuracy to judge really, really, good musicians. I hope you are just using this to see if the right notes get played...
Needed a good MIDI player. (Score:2)
FM MIDI sucked. You needed a good MIDI player. Also, there were various sound fonts for softsynthesizers. Also, you needed good and correct sound fonts to play the MIDI files correctly or else they will sound crap. Do I assume that is still an issue today?
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ou needed good and correct sound fonts to play the MIDI files correctly or else they will sound crap. Do I assume that is still an issue today?
In short, yes. Music designed for specific MIDI devices which don't have instruments arranged in GM order will sound like crap if played with a GM player.
My collections of favorite tunes! (Score:2)
http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm... [zimage.com] (MIDI, MOD, S3M, XM, IT, 669, etc.)
Black Hole Sun (Score:1)
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the worst MIDI file ever created...
https://bitmidi.com/soundgarde... [bitmidi.com]
Remember? (Score:1)
I use them nearly every single day. LOL. I found these to be the best way of finding sheet music for nearly any song. Try finding sheet music for songs like The J&M Stomp from a store and forget it. (The J& M stands for Jack and Mary Benny, the closing music for the Jack Benny Show. :)
Is this an article for Millenials? (Score:2)
I did this (Score:2)
I used to carry around a floppy with 30 or so different midi files and headphones to school, to listen to music while I worked.
I also remember trying to find which computer had the best midi wave table that made the songs sound the best.
I miss those days.
Re:Intel's MMX killed MIDI (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what went wrong for MIDI in the mainstream... Intel put the MMX functions that decoded MIDI at the center of the Pentium chip design, so while the processor decoded MIDI, it ended up below the spindle of the cooling fans, and would cause the chip to burn out completely.
MMX functions that decoded MIDI? Maybe if you didn't have a sound card (or onboard sound) with wavetable MIDI, like... pretty much everyone by the P55C era. MIDI playback didn't really occur on the CPU unless you got desperately cheap on the audio hardware.
Because MIDI/MP3 files were so small yet exact,
Exact? Only for fully electronic music, and even then, you would have had to deliver sound fonts — which were poorly supported.
the people who control computers agreed that MP3 compression with watermarks would be the standard of today because there's no good way to watermark such a small MIDI.
No, not at all. It was because you can deliver any kind of music in an MP3, without effectively giving away the sheet music for free in the bargain, and licensing wavetables.
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And what is this nonsense about putting the 'singer in MP3'? If they're doing the audio of voice in MP3, may as well do all of it..a 3min track of singing is not going to be significantly smaller than a 3min track of full audio.
Re:Intel's MMX killed MIDI (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing that went wrong in the mainstream is... so many things in your post. It shows a lack of understanding what MIDI is, what it does, and how it's used.
First of all: MIDI is a protocol that music equipment uses to communicate 'events'. Keystrokes on a keyboard or drumpad, a volume setting dialed up or down, a start signal to apply effect X or Y, etc. A MIDI file is simply a serialized / recorded stream of such messages. In effect a machine readable sheet with music notes, but with more options.
Second: due to the above, a MIDI file is not 'decoded'. It is RENDERED. Kind of like how HTML and CSS describe what a webpage should look like. Using a set of sound samples (which may vary in scope & quality between rendering devices), different models for how each instrument should contribute to the overall sound, and different kinds (and again: quality) of post-processing. This is both the strength and weakness of music in MIDI format.
The weakness lies therein that it's not an exact representation of the music as rendered. MIDI just captures the commands given to instruments that produce sounds, not the sound itself as it comes out of the instrument(s). Capturing that is where other formats like MP3, WAV etc come in. This is also why MIDI files are so small: it's just information about the sound in there, not a recording of the sound itself. Same way that a snippet of HTML (or more likely these days: a .css stylesheet) doesn't encode the actual fonts used, only specifies what fonts should be used. This size advantage was important once. Not any more these days.
The strength is that it makes the notes -> sound process easy to modify. Want to bring some drum sound to the foreground? Increase its volume relative to the other instruments. Want an instrument to play B, D, G notes rather than A, C, F? Just edit those notes. Want a piano instead of a flute? Just edit the instrument selection. Not satisfied with the quality of the rendering device? Put MIDI data through a device that includes a better quality soundbank. Etc etc. Things you can't do with as-rendered sound in say, WAV format.
Likewise, you can't 'compress' music into MIDI format. If there's vocals in there, you could record that separately & encode into MP3 for example. You could listen what notes are played on individual instruments, and put those notes into a MIDI sequencer. Sound you finally get as rendered, will not be the same as song you started with.
And that is why MIDI is still around. It does a very different job than MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis etc. And it's very good at that specific job. So it's going nowhere soon. Just updated, refined, technical implementations improved, better soundbanks included in rendering devices and so on. Maybe it will be replaced with a better standard some day. Maybe it will remain de-facto standard for many decades more. Who knows.
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Maybe it will be replaced with a better standard some day. Maybe it will remain de-facto standard for many decades more. Who knows.
MIDI 2.0 was announced about a year ago [slashdot.org], so I think MIDI is going to be with us for a very long time to come, if past history is an indicator. It's pretty astounding that the original protocol lasted nearly unchanged for over 35 years. Well, astounding for a digital format. Contemporary sheet music's format dates back almost unchanged several hundred years.
I tend to view the public's involvement with MIDI as sort of a historical anomaly. It's once again almost exclusively used as an internal protocol d
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It's once again almost exclusively used as an internal protocol during the creation process.
Well, it does mean Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
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* I asked a series of questions on a GitHub project's "issues" section (prior to Microsoft buying it) and noticed that they were suddenly gone on all computers except my own, I was suddenly logged out, and I was unable to log in again with what I now realize was a fake error message. After weeks of experimenting, it eventually dawned upon me that a GitHub employee was the maintainer of the project/repository in question, and that he kept using some secret feature which underhandedly "stealth bans" anyone he didn't like. (I was not even being rude.)
And you stayed quiet on this? This kind of behavior is enough for him to get fired.
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So they are stealing your money and you aren't doing anything about it? I see a pattern here.
* My ancient Hotmail e-mail account, created in the late 1990s and mostly kept around for nostalgic reasons, has not allowed me to log into it for ages. It's frozen at the "verify with phone" screen, which is impossible to get past. The account was like 15 years old when they suddenly decided they need to "verify" it "for my protection", forever locking me out from it.
Same here. It's a free service, so if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, fine by me, I just stopped using Hotmail.