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Music file formats are used to store musical scores, instrument sound information, song and track titles, lyrics and other text and all of the events required to accurately play back a song. Below is an introduction to the popular types of music file formats.
MIDI Formats
The standard MIDI file format is the most popular and well supported music file format. It stores information about music in a format similar to sheet music and contains the musical notes, timing information and song text (title, author, track names, lyrics, etc.) needed to describe and play an entire composition. This format is different from other music file formats in that it doesn't store the actual sounds used to recreate the music. The sounds are defined by the hardware instruments used for playback. To overcome this audio limitation, MIDI files can be used in conjunction with files that define instrument sounds, such as the Sound Fonts (SBK, SF2) and Downloadable Sounds (DLS) files. You can learn more about instrument file formats in the Patch File Formats guide. Many MIDI file format variations have been created to combine the information found in MIDI files, instrument definition files and digital audio files. MIDI/Digital Audio sequencers are the main contributers to the large number of MIDI formats including Cakewalk's WRK, Cubase's ARR and Logic's LSO formats.
See the Standard MIDI File Format guide for technical information about the format.
Tracker Formats
Tracker file formats contain both the musical score information as well as the actual instrument sound samples that are used to play a tracker song. This type of format originated with the MOD file format on the Amiga computer which had hardware that was capable of playing 4 channels of digital audio simultaneously. This capability was ahead of it's time and had a great influence on the original structure and four track limitation of the MOD format. At that time, the average PC's audio device, the PC speaker, couldn't produce quality audio output beyond simple tones and beeps. As PC audio technology advanced with the introduction of the first popular sound cards, this file format began getting used in the PC world which slowly became the most popular platform for this file format (also greatly due to the discontinued production of the Amiga computer). As technology on the PC advanced further, the MOD file format grew to accomidate higher sampling rates, increased sample sizes and more channels/tracks. Before some of it's earlier limitations were overcome, a huge number of "MOD-like" file formats were created to accomidate new programs that offered features beyond the scope of the MOD format. These include Scream Tracker's STM and S3M, Fast Tracker 2's IT and Composer 669's 669 formats, to mention a few popular ones. This explosion of new file formats created by this new class of music composition tools gave birth the Tracker Format category.
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