The General MIDI standard. The goal of General MIDI is to define the organisation of a MIDI sequence playback, so that a piano actually plays a piano
sound, a guitar a guitar sound, etc.
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Music and sounds : The MIDI Format
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Eric Chautrand
MIDI on-line
Midifiles were certainly the first means used by surfers to enliven a Web page with music.
The first reason why surfers used this format relates to Web limitations: midifiles are extremely small. A very dense arrangement rarely exceeds 100 KB.
The main snag with this format is that you can never control how a visitor will hear a sequence, since you do not know the kind of device that will play it back. Indeed, since it is only performance data, it is totally dependent on the quality and type of sounds that the MIDI component can generate.
On a Macintosh, the operating system includes an extension, Quicktime Musical Instruments, which is a kind of virtual synthesizer equipped with 128 sounds corresponding to the General MIDI specification.
The General MIDI standard. The goal of General MIDI is to define the organisation of a MIDI sequence playback, so that a piano actually plays a piano
sound, a guitar a guitar sound, etc.
So you can be sure that a Macintosh visitor will be able to listen to the sequence, provided that he has not deactivated the extension and has the appropriate plug-in to play it (automatically installed on all browsers since their version 3, Mac/PC).
PC users must have a sound card equipped with a wavetable. This is the case for all the basic sound cards available on the market, whatever their price.