Browser support for music MIDI file (2013)

By Xah Lee. Date: 2013-05-12. Last updated: 2019-08-19.

The Unfortunate Fate of Music MIDI File (2013)

MIDI is really a great tech, but unfortunately, it never picked up in computer.

MIDI is a standard format to record musical notes. MIDI file is tiny in size, especially great for piano music. For example, a 5 minute piano piece is only 11k bytes. (in mp4 it's 4 mega bytes).

10 years ago, i'd expect by now that on each computer we have high quality sampled sound library for MIDI, so that perhaps just a 100 mega bytes you'd have entire collection of piano music in history, recorded by professionals. Not so.

Today, on the web, MIDI isn't supported by browsers.

Here is test:

Here is the embedded midi file: bach_wtc1_f04.mid