Windows 95 Support for MIDI

Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is a serial interface standard that allows for the connection of music synthesizers, musical instruments, and computers. The MIDI standard is based partly on hardware and partly on a description of the way in which music and sounds are encoded and communicated between MIDI devices.

MIDI is used as a development tool for musicians. Virtually all advanced music equipment supports MIDI, and MIDI offers a convenient way to control the equipment very precisely. MIDI is similar to the electronic equivalent of sheet music. For example, if you buy a CD that contains a particular performance of a piece of music, the data on the CD requires no interpretation at all — it's straightforward playback. If you buy the sheet music and have someone play it, it requires very little data, but, depending on the quality of the instruments and the musicians, you can get a good or bad interpreration of that piece of music.

Windows 95 supports the General MIDI Specification to request particular instruments and sounds. This specification is an industry standard that defines how MIDI should be used, and it is supported by Microsoft and most MIDI sound card manufacturers.

Windows 95 supports a new technology called MIDI streams. This technology is used in advanced sound cards to play very complex MIDI sequences with less CPU use. Support for this technology allows Windows 95 to communicate multiple MIDI instructions simultaneously within a single interrupt. As a result, playing MIDI files now requires even less computing power than it did before, and it allows developers to process MIDI instructions, graphics, and other data even more successfully.

For more information about playing a MIDI sound file, see online Help.