What Is Midi?
“Midi” stands for “Musical Industries Digital Interface”
- It is the standard for a digital signaling protocol that controls electronic musical instruments, allowing them to intercommunicate and be controlled by computers
A midi file consists of a list of instructions or “sequence” that tells the synthesizer, keyboard or sound card which note to play, which instrumental sound, when to play it, how loud, duration etc
- Midi files have the “ .mid “ extension
It does not contain digitized audio as in a CD, wave file, real audio, and is a tiny fraction of the size since it only consists of instructions
- Entire Beethoven 5th Symphony for full orchestra less than 2 MB; digitized audio file many MB or GB.
Quality of playback entirely dependent on quality of synthesizer, keyboard or soundcard regardless of how well sequence prepared