In the 90s, web developers often used title.mid as the default background music for their homepage. It would loop endlessly while the visitor read about Star Trek fan theories.
On the other end of the spectrum lies .midi (or .mid ). Unlike WMA or MP3, a MIDI file is not a recording of sound. It is a set of instructions. Think of a MIDI file as a digital player piano roll. It does not contain the sound of a piano; rather, it contains the data telling the computer: "Play Middle C at this velocity, for this long, using a Piano sound." title.wma midi
MIDI files are incredibly small—often just a few kilobytes—because they contain no actual audio data. In the days of slow internet connections, MIDI was the king of website background music. If you visited a fan site for a video game in 1998, you likely heard a tinny, synthesized version of the theme song playing automatically. That was a MIDI file. In the 90s, web developers often used title
There is a massive movement to preserve video game history. Many early PC games stored their soundtracks as MIDI files because of space constraints. However, finding the original MIDI files can be difficult. Archivists often find themselves sorting through mislabeled files or "recordings" of the MIDI output (saved as WMA) to reverse-engineer the original sheet music for historical preservation. Unlike WMA or MP3, a MIDI file is not a recording of sound