MIDI

In simple terms, represents keystrokes of a piano, but it can likely also represent other effects (TODO confirm: bend, vibrato, slides, attack strength)

Can contain multiple parallel tracks as seen from the Wikipedia example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MIDI_sample.mid

You can see what it contains well with GUI music editor.

MIDI is fun. It is a basic high level representation of most instrumental music, including beats.

To actually listen to MIDI, you need a software synthesizer, which knows what sound to make for each note. One way to specify such instruments is the SoundFont file format.

Convert MIDI to more common standalone formats:

Contains instructions on how to synthesize MIDI.

Extension: sf2.

Can be imported for example by:

Opens a virtual MIDI piano GUI. It just works on Ubuntu 20.04: askubuntu.com/questions/34391/virtual-midi-piano-keyboard-setup/1298026#1298026

VMPK is a virtual device that replicates what you would get by connecting a physical MIDI keyboard to your computer. It is not a software synthesizer on its own. But it does connect to a working synthesizer by default (Sonivox EAS) which makes it produce sounds out-of-the box.

TODO: then I messed with my sound settings, and then it stopped working by default on the default "MIDI Connection" > "MIDI Out Driver" > "Network". But it still works on "SonivoxEAS".

A hello world of actually connecting it to a specific software synthesizer manually on Advanced Linux Sound Architecture with aconnect can be found at: askubuntu.com/questions/34391/virtual-midi-piano-keyboard-setup/1298026#1298026

Save to a MIDI file: askubuntu.com/questions/709673/save-as-midi-when-playing-from-vmpk-qsynth/1298231#1298231

Reasonable default key mappings to keyboard covering 2 octaves.

3 multiple simultaneous keys did not work (tested "ZQI"). This might just be a limitation of my keyboard however.

TODO how to save to a .mid file? askubuntu.com/questions/709673/save-as-midi-when-playing-from-vmpk-qsynth

SourceForge.