I don't really get annoyed since people don't know what the song actually consists of.
People mostly called those music as 'chiptunes', however.

I've noticed that many times people call music from a game "MIDI" without even knowing if it's MIDI or not. How could they possibly know without having been involved in making the game? (Well, unless .MID files are present somewhere, that would sort of be proof positive.)

I think it's because MIDI music never sounded great on most older systems that only had synth support instead of wavetables, so the average person thinks of MIDI as being "bad", so when they hear generally bad music they assume it was done using some sort of MIDI.

So anyone using the term "MIDI" in such a way is either uneducated about the subject and is throwing lingo around to look smart, or are using the term as an insult, even though it technically isn't. :P

Hehe... and yet the same folks who hear music spooled from a PC game CD-ROM rave how great it sounds (most of the time); yet (at least, it used to be like this), almost ALL of PC game Redbook was MIDI composed and MIDI generated <grin> 😀

I like the term "chiptunes" 🤣

Well MIDI is just the way how the music data is transferred, it says nothing how music is rendered from this data. So talking about 'MIDI music' is already wrong in itself.
I do not distinguish between ISA graphics and PCI graphics either...

What people mean is usually completely different. In most cases they think of music rendered by a consumer wavetable card using the general midi standard (instrument set with related samples)...
Ofcourse you hear the limitation, as you hear the limitation with OPL or SID sound compared to todays orchestral MP3 soundtracks.

To get somewhat realistic in this comparison again, lets reconsider the technical setting.
Due to cpu performance and storage limitation you got just the notes as midi file in dos games and had to bring your own synthesizer.
It is simply not compareable to todays standards and I think the early PC sound engines/solutions/composers did a damn good job.

Are Adlib-only soundtracked games considered MIDI? Like those id games with the IMF files. I used to believe so but they're not, are they? Games with MIDI soundtracks can support Adlib, though. Which is where it's easy to confuse...

MusicallyInspired wrote:

Are Adlib-only soundtracked games considered MIDI? Like those id games with the IMF files. I used to believe so but they're not, are they? Games with MIDI soundtracks can support Adlib, though. Which is where it's easy to confuse...

I would consider them MIDI (but not following the General MIDI specifications/guidelines, per-say). The reason: IMF/CMF/ROL/ADL formats etc... can all be directly converted to some form of MIDI file. The same with DOSBox's "DRO" raw OPL format that it can capture.

For me MIDI means I can play it back with any software and hardware that conforms to the MIDI standard.

So for me if I can take the song and play it on a synth of my choice then I consider it MIDI.

midi is the computerised version of sheet music

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

For me MIDI means I can play it back with any software and hardware that conforms to the MIDI standard.

So for me if I can take the song and play it on a synth of my choice then I consider it MIDI.

It was a very weird experience for me when I got some old DOS game MIDI files and played them back through the MIDI-out interface on my digital piano... especially since the polyphony on my digital piano is terrible. >_>;