Not as fun to read, outside the music industry. Lack of consistent samples has been MIDI's major issues, and even in games these days, nobody uses it, sadly.
MIDI is just a control protocol. You are thinking of General MIDI [1], which defined a vague set of sounds associated with a program number, that allowed playing a sequence on different engines with horribly mixed results as you said.
MIDI 2.0 brings additional capabilities to device interconnection, and AFAIK has nothing to do with GM (which not many people care about anymore)
Lack of consistent samples is not an issue with professional use of MIDI.
Professionals (musicians, engineers, etc) don't use MIDI as a general-purpose playback method, they use it to control their samplers, synths, external effects units etc.
They don't need "consistent samples" because they provide their own samples, different for every song (plus pure synth sounds, etc).
This is going to be hard to explain without outlining a whole recording setup, but basically, a lot of the time, in a given musician's studio, the program numbers are going to refer to different things depending on how he chose to configure the patches (presets) on his synthesisers. In some cases, patches aren't even used, such as when an old Minimoog is retrofitted with MIDI and the notion of "Flute" or "Piano" becomes meaningless. In other cases, the synthesiser is a sampler and the samples were programmed by the musician at custom program numbers. In the case of software instruments in a DAW, patches are usually chosen by the DAW itself and no program message is sent to the synth, just note on/off, modulation, pitch bend and other controller messages, and if a switch of instruments is needed during a song, you just add a new track for that.
Basically, MIDI began as a protocol used between hardware devices. General MIDI is a product of the ROMpler era, a ROMpler being a sampler that can't be reprogrammed, i.e. what most people know as a "keyboard", and it's far from universal.
Musicians often don't care about standardising. They're hooking up all sorts of wonky instruments to their rig and reconfiguring it for one-off projects. There is often no need to recall specific patches after you've recorded the part you wanted.
>and even in games these days, nobody uses it, sadly.
Most recorded music, soundtracks, and almost 100% of game music is been done with MIDI.
MIDI doesn't amount to the .mid files that people used to download / play on some player on their PC and which sound tinny.
It's a professional specification that's used in every single studio, and is the basis of every professional digital workstation for recording music and sequencing electronic instruments.
What you're describing is like confusing the JVM with Java applets, as if that's its only use.
It does not make sense to use it in games. It would need a good synthesis engine plus samples which consumes much more CPU than reproducing a MP3.
If in your game you go the synthesis mode (chiptunes and whatnot) MIDI is a comunication protocol between devices.. if you want to use it to communicate a game with its own synthesis engine it makes less sense. Buy you may want MIDI so you compose in a standard music composing program.
It is used also in other areas that need automation, as lighting (DMX).
But I agree it would be nice to have better examples.
> It would need a good synthesis engine plus samples which consumes much more CPU than reproducing a MP3.
My 386 could do a decent job running DOS trackers (software synths) years before mp3’s were feasible on PC hardware (there was not enough storage, bandwidth or compute for MP3’s).
The Kosmic Free Music Foundation published a ton of music on one CD-ROM this way:
