The Method of MIDI Much in the same way that two computers communicate via modems, two synthesizers communicate via MIDI. The information exchanged between two MIDI devices is musical in nature. MIDI information tells a synthesizer, in its most basic mode, when to.
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Introduction into MIDI
MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and has been the rage among electronic musicians throughout its six year existence. It is a powerful tool for composers and teachers alike. It allows musicians to be more creative on stage and in the studio. It allows composers to write music that no human could ever perform. But it is NOT a tangible object, a thing to be had. MIDI is a communications protocol that allows electronic musical instruments to interact with each other.All too often I have seen misinformed customers browsing through a music store: 'Where do you keep your MIDIs?' 'I'd like to get a MIDI for my home computer.' 'I need to get two MIDIs so they can talk to each other, right?' Explaining to customers that they cannot just get a MIDI becomes frustrating to the salesman. Fortunately, the average consumer is learning more about the concept of MIDI through articles such as this one. To have a complete understanding of how MIDI works, though, one should learn its history.
The Method of MIDI
Much in the same way that two computers communicate via modems, two synthesizers communicate via MIDI. The information exchanged between two MIDI devices is musical in nature. MIDI information tells a synthesizer, in its most basic mode, when to start and stop playing a specific note. Other information shared includes the volume and modulation of the note, if any. MIDI information can also be more hardware specific. It can tell a synthesizer to change sounds, master volume, modulation devices, and even how to receive information. In more advanced uses, MIDI information can to indicate the starting and stopping points of a song or the metric position within a song. More recent applications include using the interface between computers and synthesizers to edit and store sound information for the synthesizer on the computer.The basis for MIDI communication is the byte. Through a combination of bytes a vast amount of information can be transferred. Each MIDI command has a specific byte sequence. The first byte is the status byte, which tells the MIDI device what function to perform. Encoded in the status byte is the MIDI channel. MIDI operates on 16 different channels, numbered 0 through 15. MIDI units will accept or ignore a status byte depending on what channel the machine is set to receive. Only the status byte has the MIDI channel number encoded. All other bytes are assumed to be on the channel indicated by the status byte until another status byte is received.
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Reddit, I've taken some time to crawl the internet and combine my findings into a single collection to share with you all. I'm going to post this around in various places because I believe that this should be shared with as many individuals as possible.
I made sure to crawl a large variety of websites and eliminate any duplicate files (I did this via checksum not filename and kept the longest file name). However there's a large amount of files that aren't as descriptive as others due to the way they were hosted and the way the page displayed the track data. While a humungous amount of these are clearly obvious, some may not be, just a warning!
That being said, this is the largest midi collection on the internet spanning numerous repositories past and present. I've done a lot of work to crawl hundreds of sites, download their entire publicly available midi (I didn't crawl paywall content but I've peaked behind and it's not much better than what's available in public), keep the best named uniques and organize them into a folder.
Genres include: Pop, Classical (Piano/Violin/Guitar), EDM, VideoGame, Movie/TV Theme
I made this collection with the intent of ensuring that a large amount of well created music wasn't lost due to the sands of time or the frustration of 5 file downloads per hour restrictions. I feel like all producers could benefit from having a profoundly large swath of midi files at their fingertips for inspiration, reference or remix purposes. This is a large collection, with a large amount of content creators, too many to reference here and their identities are generally impossible to know. Some will be spot on and miraculous; others will sound like total garbage. I didn't go through it by hand due to not having 15 lifetimes of spare time. You get to download the collection and taste de jour.
This is a reference tool kit and like all things, is not flawless but does the job well. Also I discovered that many sites with impressive looking file counts don't even come close to their listed size; not all but most are running 1/10th of their posted file counts. Enjoy and make lots of music!
130,000 Midi File Collection 3.65Gb Uncompressed / 1.02 Gb Compressed ZIP ||
Pastebin Sample of Structure: http://pastebin.com/Q50iwHmb
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With Love,
The Midi Man :-)
Edit: Looking for some Song Stems to accompany your MIDI :)?
These guys have done fantastic work; it's about 27Gb combined and quite comprehensive. Get on those remixes!
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edit2: MagnetLink for Torrent provided by /u/trentula -- thanks bud!
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:7E26D029E2D0A0635E26C445594AC4D44E217A95&dn=130000_Pop_Rock_Classical_Videogame_EDM_MIDI_Archive%5b6_19_15%5d.zip&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80
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edit3: The Drums of Passion are here for your pleasure: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/3anwu8/the_drum_percussion_midi_archive_800k/