There is something beautifully old-web about a music archive explaining which mouse button to use if you want to save a MIDI file instead of playing it.
Visit Colin D. MacDonald’s Scott Joplin MIDI page
The page, last updated in May 2000, is part of a larger ragtime, march, and waltz collection built around downloadable MIDI sequences.
For Scott Joplin alone, the index runs through dozens of compositions with titles and dates: Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer, The Easy Winners, Solace, Pine Apple Rag, Wall Street Rag, and many less famous pieces.
The catalog is the interface
Modern music services hide the file and emphasize playback.
This site does nearly the opposite.
Each entry is treated as an object the visitor can play, save, inspect, or download in compressed form. Separate sequence-summary pages provide additional information, and the larger site organizes music both by title and by composer.
The result feels closer to a personal digital library than a streaming service.
That matters for MIDI in particular.
A MIDI file is not a recording in the ordinary sense. It is performance data: notes, timing, instruments, and instructions rendered by whatever synthesizer or sound hardware the listener has available. The same sequence could sound noticeably different on different computers.
That made MIDI a natural web format in the 1990s. Files were tiny, downloadable over slow connections, and easy to pass around.
MacDonald’s page preserves not only the music but the habits surrounding it. There are frame and non-frame navigation options, ZIP files, small indexes designed to reduce download time, and browser-specific instructions for saving content.
The copyright footer dates the larger project to 1994–2001.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes music archives because the pre-streaming web treated music files as things people collected, organized, downloaded, and moved between machines.
This Scott Joplin page is still doing exactly that.
A century-old rag survived another technological era as a .mid file.