Nice find! I started a thread a while back asking about good sources for MIDI music. Looks like I will be spending some time going through all of these MIDI's. 😁

Wow, this is REALLY sad... that site is gone.

I'm bumping this just in case there is any chance that someone knows of a backup of this site anywhere aside from archive.org.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200815000000*/h … /midi-melodies/

It is there, and it has functional download links... but, as usual for archive.org it is extremely slow to browse and when I clicked through randomly for a few minutes there were definitely some pages missing.

That's a shame, it'd be good if someone backed it up but I don't think there are often backups of a site without prior notification of it going down?

You can use a wayback link with "*" set for the time and a "*" at the end to get a full listing of what the wayback machine *did* get and when: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://en.midim … /midi-melodies/*
Picking a link in there, when you see an entry in green it's a 302 redirect so not usually a useful hit, the blue ones are usually successful though.

Going through the links it looks like wayback did get a good pull of the site over the years it was up, but recreating it wouldn't be so simple. Here's the link for all the .mid files it did get: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://en.midim … ody.ru/midi.php*
I'm not sure it's got everything as some of the links come up with "file not found" from the site itself. There's a linux based Wayback machine downloader that you could use on this to automate pulling it out of there, it works with Windows using WSL.

It's indeed a pity the site is gone. I found a different one https://midistock.ru/ Seems to a bit smaller, but still has a very big collection.
The dead one mentions 6000 artists, this one says 4000.

Argh, I *so* should have found this site when it was still up. And somebody (maybe me...) should have mirrored it. It's only a pile of tiny text files after all.

Have been trying my luck on archive.org, but only maybe 1 in 4 files is backed up. The site was captured right up to 2021, but the files I have been able to download are all from snapshots in 2014. In general, if one file for an artist is OK, they all will be - but not always. That's probably just an artifact of people uploading a lot in bulk, most of the files per artist uploaded by the same person at the same time.

Also, it's far more than just prog rock and metal, there's electro, folk, pop and lots of classic rock and more recent alternative stuff - but somebody clearly had a very similar taste in obscure metal to a younger me, and some of those files are still OK. Will be able to troll my colleague who thinks everything grindcore gore band Carcass did from their ultra-commercial third album "Necroticism-Descanting the Insalubrious" onward was pure sell-out 😜