1 Million MIDI files
Posted By Scott on December 6, 2009
One million plus MIDI and karaoke files is what the EBAY auction said was on the two DVD set plus act now and you get the two bonus CD PRO MIDI files pack all for just $20. Media shipping was only a couple bucks from some international location. I couldn’t resist as I’ve spent quite a few hours the last year browsing the internet for MIDI file. So bing .. and bang boom I pressed the Buy-It-Now button and 1,000,000 MIDI files were mine.
Several days later I got a small package and with two DVD’s and two CD’s with ugly marker pen labels which wasn’t a good sign. I then proceeded to look at the disks and seen most everything was compressed with Winarchive which has an file extension of .rar. They supplied a trial version of Winrar which work great and after a couple hours I have uncompressed 369,000 some files to a new ONEMGMIDI folder on my second 250G drive on my PC. There were several folders on the DVD’s I skipped then some as they were labeled with foreign names on genre I’m not interested in.
So did I get my monies worth? Yes then some. Surprisingly there was also some nice sheet music in .PDF format. I don’t want to say what was on it but that alone was worth several times the cost. The distributor of the set did warn there were duplicates and he was right on that. It appears many of the files were downloaded by a robot via the Internet as the file names were often like “Mustang Sally some.site.net” . Fortunately it’s very easy to tell which are duplicates as you just sort the list by file size!
So how do I find anything in a directory with hundreds of folders each with anywhere from a few to 1000′s of files? Windows XP Desk Top search to the rescue! I downloaded the most recent version from Microsoft.com. Then I right clicked on the Properties of my ONEMGMIDI folder. Under advanced options there is a make Search enabled option, I clicked on that and then came back an hour later after Windows indexed the files. Luckily the file names for the most part are very good for searching on with blanks between words in the song title. For Desktop Search to find them I had one more step and that was to add my ONEMGMIDI folder to it’s list of file folders it searches.
WOW … it works great !!!! I search for the word like “Mustang ” and get back a list of 60 entries for the song Mustang Sally. There are many duplicates but still probably there are 5 different good versions along with 10 short demo and simplified versions. I searched for ”Art Tatum” and found a folder with like 80 excellent songs he is featured on. I’m very happy with this purchase, this will save me a lot of time in the future. Quite often a MIDI file version will have tracks that are pretty close to the original recording which often is a version too difficult for me to play or the piano and keyboard tracks are boring background fillers. What I look for is a piano based arrangement of a song that has a good bass for my left hand and a nice piano lead for my right .. then I’m all set!!!!
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