suspecting that everything supports MP3 now, while it's possible that MIDI remains somewhat niche.

a MIDI example (not even sure how plurk will handle this!): http://www.pedag.org/...

an MP3 example (which is the one most likely to remain where it is): http://www.pedag.org/...

plurk doesn't have a special music icon for displaying either of those (unlike web page contents or graphics thumbnails).

MIDI tends to be difficult without installing specialist apps, and often sound fonts. mp3, wav and a lot of other "audio" formats. MIDI doesn't really have the "audio" in it. I can bring the .mid into zrythm, probably almost all DAWs.

The .mp3 opens a new tab, and can play from that.

And so far Zrythm has crashed 3 times. I'm not a fan, because it tends to do this.

the conclusion that MIDI is still stuck where it was 25+ years ago then, while MP3 has leapt ahead to become the de facto standard (over WAV and over other niche things such as Ogg).

this is one of those situations where a sample of one is actually a good indication of something not being widely supported (whereas individual anecdotes in the other direction for this question would be less compelling).

that's fair. MIDI genuinely hasn't really moved in terms of technology. There I think is a competing standard which gives you some advancements over the MIDI standard. But really nothing's changed, and pretty much from the get go, people were saying, "this is almost good enough, but..."

I can play MP3 directly, but not MIDI. There is a spec called General MIDI which (I believe) is a set of conventions mapping MIDI channels to specific instruments, intended to allow MIDI to be played without complicated setup.

using the standard instrument set. But MIDI clearly hasn't been standardly supported as a file type across the various operating systems in all the years/decades of waiting.

in some ways it’s good that operating system vendors have left that as a market opportunity for specialist vendors though - it encourages product innovation.

other than a brief time with stuff like the Amiga, and Atari ST, MIDI really has been meant for people with specific, "need" for it, much more so than a "general purpose" format.