Mark Headrick’s General MIDI page accidentally became a history of everything browsers stopped doing.
Visit Mark Headrick’s General MIDI page
The page is still maintained—the header says it was last modified July 17, 2025—but its real archaeological value is in the layers underneath. Headrick says the page was originally designed around the Crescendo plug-in in Netscape. When that died, he adapted it for Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Then Firefox plug-in behavior changed. Then NPAPI disappeared. Then Microsoft removed familiar MIDI plumbing from newer Windows setups.
Instead of abandoning the page, he kept documenting workarounds.
By 2021, his instructions for playing MIDI in Firefox 95 involved the MIDI Player and Jazz-MIDI extensions, CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth and CoolSoft MIDIMapper. Earlier notes preserve fixes for Firefox 21, Firefox 52, Firefox 55 and Windows 7.
That is a ridiculous amount of infrastructure just to click a .mid file and hear music.
Which is exactly why the page is interesting now.
A music collection wrapped in compatibility history
Headrick organizes the archive by genre: bluegrass, classical, country, dance, electronic, folk, heavy metal, miscellaneous, New Age and Celtic, pop and rock, rap, R&B, trance, television and movie themes.
There is a random-MIDI control and a jukebox. The newest listed file was uploaded in February 2017: “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees.
Headrick is also careful about authorship. He explicitly says he did not sequence or arrange most of the files and credits belong to the original creators where information exists. His role is collector and maintainer.
One tiny sentence tells you how old the technical assumptions once were: some files were tweaked to sound better on a Creative AWE64.
That name alone opens another rabbit hole—Sound Blaster cards, General MIDI, SoundFonts, hardware wavetable synthesis and the period when the same .mid file could sound dramatically different depending on the sound hardware in your PC.
The page therefore preserves two things at once. There is the music collection itself, and there is a timeline of the machinery required to keep that collection playable as browsers and operating systems changed underneath it.
Modern sites often hide compatibility changes behind a service layer. Old personal pages had to fight them in public.
For CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list, that makes Headrick’s page more than another MIDI directory. It is a living compatibility log stretching from Netscape plug-ins into modern Firefox.
The MIDI files survived.
The browser stack needed several resurrections.