 Seven years ago, a fellow named "MIDI_MAN" compiled 130,000 unique MIDI files by browsing a ton of sites, placing them into directories, and generally assembling years of MIDI music. Now that collection (1gb compressed, 3.5gb uncompressed, 130,000 files for real!) is at the Internet Archive at this URL: 26 comments
@textfiles also, torrents are so nostalgic for me... that was fun, dl'd already :D :D Now just to spend the rest of my life hunting through these files in FL Studio @textfiles I almost forgot the obligatory Tim and Eric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVYtkh-LO4 @textfiles Nice, I remember embedding midi files on my homepage... back when FM synthesis was the standard midi synth type and wave table was the reserve of high end pro-grade equipment... Thanks  @textfiles my first introduction to the joy of midi was a bootleg midi version of "eye in the sky" that I could use on my Atari ST and was so excited that I could change the instruments played via my Yamaha SY55. I didn't hear a recording of it until many years later (didn't know what it was called!) and it was magic to hear the original. @textfiles nice! I think I got this collection back in 2015 when I first found out about it on reddit. Nice that its on archive.org though!  @textfiles Install https://www.fluidsynth.org/ to play the MIDI files. Under GNU/Linux (Debian) use: apt install fluidsynth. This is a command line tool.   @textfiles Thankyou. This is going to be fun in my DAW. I'm a lousey keyboardist and play alot of bad tunes using MIDI so am looking forward to experiencing alot of this. MIDI is a language that every computer should learn 🎹🎼🎶 :)  @textfiles This warms my heart... Way back I had a computer a local library threw out with Windows 95, 16MB RAM, and a whopping 500MB HDD and I wanted to collect music... So MIDI was about all I could do given the space constraints and the fact that I had really bad 28kbps dialup. I still managed to collect nearly 100MB of MIDI files before that drive died. Wish I had a good MIDI card then, and maybe it'll be okay now under Linux with a good software MIDI emulator. Thanks for surfacing this! @textfiles I used to spend hours looking for midi music to include in games that I wrote for myself and friends to play. This collection would've been awesome to have back then.  MIDI, General MIDI and MIDI FILES are three different concepts that most people usually confuse for each other. This is a collection of MIDI files, probably using the General MIDI instrument set definition, but MIDI itself is not involved when someone plays one of these files on their computer. A bit confusing, I know... |
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@textfiles before mp3 came along, midi was the format of choice. Back in the day I had some myself.