What is a .MIDI file?
MIDI stores musical note and instrument instructions rather than recorded audio, so any synthesiser can play it back.
- Did you know
- MIDI’s chief architects, Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, received a Technical Grammy in 2013 for its creation.
- MIDI does not record sound at all; it stores note, timing and instrument instructions, so a tiny file can hold a whole song.
- The Standard MIDI File specification was adopted as a MIDI standard in 1991 to store these sequences in a portable file.
- General MIDI, agreed in 1992, fixed a common set of 128 instrument sounds so a file would play back consistently across devices.
- The first public MIDI demonstration, at the January 1983 NAMM show, linked a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 to a Roland Jupiter-6.
- What Analyser shows you
- Parse Standard MIDI Files: format, tempo (BPM), time signature, General MIDI instruments, track names, note counts, and duration.
- Open a .MIDI file
- Drag a .MIDI file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.
- Related formats
- .MID. See all supported file types.