Before streaming audio became effortless, a website could play music with a file small enough to fit comfortably on a floppy disk. Aaron Walz’s MIDI Home is still online from that version of the Web, and it has the web-ring scars to prove it.
The site dates itself to March 10, 1998, with the midishack.net address arriving in 2003. Walz built it around his own MIDI compositions, video-game music and a desire to teach other people how the format worked. There are pages for original tracks, Final Fantasy music, other game MIDI files, theme songs, beginner tutorials, recordings and an archived guestbook.
The page also contains something increasingly rare: an actual mission statement from a person who made a website because he wanted to share things.
The Web when music files were tiny
MIDI does not store recorded sound the way an MP3 does. It stores musical instructions: notes, timing, instruments and other performance data that a synthesizer turns into sound. That made MIDI ideal for slow connections and early personal websites. A song could be surprisingly small because the file did not need to contain the audio waveform.
The tradeoff was that the same file could sound very different depending on the hardware or software synthesizer playing it. That was part limitation, part personality.
Walz’s site captures that period unusually well. The navigation still includes an Original MIDI Ring, links to other authors, old award graphics and references to composing pages with Notepad and Microsoft FrontPage. The news archive eventually reaches 2009, but the structure remains unmistakably late-1990s personal Web.
A personal archive that stayed personal
The strongest thing about MIDI Shack is that it never became a generic music portal. It remains somebody’s collection: his compositions, the game music that inspired him, tutorials he wrote because he wanted to teach, and links he thought other people would find useful.
That is precisely the kind of small, specific publishing the Ancient Web project keeps finding. CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains the larger corpus for anyone who wants to dig through more of it.
MIDI Shack is still there, background music, web rings and all. Open it with sound enabled if you are feeling brave.