midi

I had never been much of a midi fan until recently. As a musician with recording software, and just enough knowledge to get it running, I have found midi to be useful indeed. I like to use it as a quick mock up part to be looped and used as a practice tool. Of course, you can take it steps further and write entire pieces, assigning virtual instruments and synth parts to and if you know what you're doing, can come up with a pretty cool result. You can find just about any composition imaginable as a midi file someone has encoded. And to think, I always thought midi was that cheesy, honking generic sound that played when the dancing hamster came frolicking across your screen. And I was right! Well, it was that and a whole lot more...
Midi files go beyond simple pitch and duration and can store multiple parameters like volume, modulation, attack, decay and more. As a midi-newbie, I am still learning most of this, but the software makes it easy. And the industry has a fairly universal standard, so most of the sounds are the same or similar from one instrument to the next. Or at least they can emulate the same 'general midi' parameters and get close.
There's a lot of musicians using midi these days. Probably more than you might think. It has really taken it's place in technology as the common tongue of digital discourse between man, computer and other devices.