Did anyone else collect MIDI files in the pre MP3 days? I don't know what happened to my collection, but I had everything: pop, classical, movie scores, etc. I loved how they managed to recreate intricate and grand things in a limited format.
> Did anyone else collect MIDI files in the pre MP3 days?
Oh yes! And I still copy them over every time I migrate to a new music making computer. And play them back every few years for a good smile.
I even spent quite a bit of money on commercially produced floppy disks of midi files containing arrangements of popular songs of the day. It enabled an early form of remixing those songs.
This was quite a thing during its heyday and was quite interlinked with the MT-32 sound module by Roland, which also ended up spawning an entire subculture of classical music lovers transcribing countless classical (and thus public domain) pieces into MIDI and posting them on BBS systems.
Some of the modern classical midi archives on the web are descendants of those BBS sharing communities and I'm assuming that numerous midi files on current websites are actually from those days (late 80s to early 90s).
The eventual standard MIDI GM (for standardizing program change messages into specific instruments) and subsequent dialects like Roland's MIDI GS and Yamaha's MIDI XG standardizing control change messages for FX like reverb etc. all stem from those days.
The MT32 and later Sound Canvas series modules and Yamaha's competing models like the FB-01 eventually ended up becoming incorporated into many PC sound cards.
Oh, definitely. Even after MP3 compression came along, MIDI and MOD files were just so much smaller and quicker to download over a modem at my baud rate.
I collected them from FTP sites and still keep them (later on vanbasco.com made hoarding MIDIs unnecessary)
One of my guilty pleasures is to get a well done MIDI file from that era and render it using my Kronos and Logic loaded with NI, Arturia stuff. It’s impressive how you can produce something that was basically inconceivable to the original MIDI author that was using perhaps a Gravis Ultrasound.
