# Can you get MIDI files to play along to?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-get-midi-files-to-play-along-to/45221>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 12, 2000, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-get-midi-files-to-play-along-to/45221 "2000-12-12T19:14:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![teabag](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9e8a1a/32.png) [@teabag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/teabag)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2000, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-get-midi-files-to-play-along-to/45221/1 "2000-12-12T19:14:41Z")

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A guitarist friend of mine plays with a bassist and vocalist and told me that to fill in the other parts (drums, keyboard etc) when the band are playing he uses backing tracks in MIDI format along with a MIDI box to actually make the noise. Since I can do the same on my computer (and so can anyone else with soundcard/speakers) I figured that someone else must ahve thought of this before me. Searching the internet, however, turned up nothing.

So does anyone know of a site where such MIDI files can be obtained? Or is there a copyright issue which prevents them being put on the net?

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**Author:** ![Delta-9](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3be4f8/32.png) [@Delta-9](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Delta-9)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2000, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-get-midi-files-to-play-along-to/45221/2 "2000-12-12T19:38:46Z")

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Well, I typed “MIDI” into a search engine and came up with a whole buncha sites. [Here’s](http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/SMF.html) one.

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**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2000, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-get-midi-files-to-play-along-to/45221/3 "2000-12-12T20:05:23Z")

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I play along on my banjo with MIDI files all the time. If you fork over a few bucks for a decent MIDI editor/player, you can do Useful Things such as mute tracks and vary the tempo. I use Power Tracks Pro from [http://www.pgmusic.com](http://www.pgmusic.com) , which was around $30.

Also, I’ve found that the sound cards that come with PC’s from the factory are mostly pretty poor when it comes to MIDI, because the instruments sound like something from a cheap video game. Unfortunately, I’m back to using this right now because I lost\* my SoundBlaster AWE32.

I don’t know your style of music that you’d like to play, but I have found many of the ones I use at [http://www.banjo.com/BG-Midi.html](http://www.banjo.com/BG-Midi.html) .

- How could I lose a sound card? I had to restore my PC from the original CD, so I removed the sound card while I did that. Later, I couldn’t find it. It must have gotten thrown away.

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**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2000, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-get-midi-files-to-play-along-to/45221/4 "2000-12-12T23:02:32Z")

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Regarding high quality midi.  
If you are willing to devote 50-80% of a PII’s resources to making beautiful music, TiMIDIty is the way to go.  
Get the large wav patches, the ones at least 10MB in size.  
The difference in sound is really incredible. I can’t describe it, but it’s worth the extra CPU crunching.  
There are a lot of sites devoted to explaining its installation and setup. Run a search on Google.  
A lot of them are in Japanese, though. 🙂