It looks just like a portable MP3 player, but the software is made to play MIDI files.
For those who don't know, MIDI is the digital equivalent of sheet music. It offers extremely high lossless compression ratios; a whole orchestral piece can fit in a few dozen KB of space. Note that MIDI only works with music, not voice.
Thousands of songs can be fit in the space of a mere 128MB. Perfect for composers and those who love video game music. (link)-- Aq_Bi, Jan 08 2005 VG Music http://www.vgmusic.com/Video Game Music Archive [Aq_Bi, Jan 08 2005] This plays many file types, including MIDI, on a Palm PDA. http://mmplayer.com/I got this software for the movie capabilities -- two full-length motion pictures fit on a 256MB card! But it has passable MIDI support, too. [Amos Kito, Jan 11 2005] (?) MIDI Player/Composer http://www.cs.lth.s....olssonx2/midi.html"The goal of this master thesis project is to develop a MIDI player and composer application for mobile phones on behalf on Teleca Software Solutions AB. The most advanced applications currently existing on the market feature a player for playing music files and a composer with pre-defined music patterns. Our applications should go one step deeper, to make it possible to design your own music pattern (e.g. your own drum solo)." [half, Jan 11 2005] How does MIDI replicate the timber/sound of various instruments or doesn't it bother?-- scubadooper, Jan 08 2005 A portable MIDI playback device would be a fine thing, but I have to disagree with you about the losslessness of compression using MIDI.
It may be lossless in encoding a piece of sheet music, but in that case, it really isn't compression, it simply encoding. MIDI is most certainly lossy if you try to use it to compress a musical performance. It can actually come pretty close with a performance that is just a piano, or some other instruments in which the performer has little control other each note played. But MIDI can't come very close at all for a recording of a wind instrument or violin where the performer can dynamically control the tone quality, vibrato, etc.
I'm not saying that listening to MIDI files can't be enjoyable if it's a well produced MIDI file. I'm just saying you shouldn't call it lossless compression. It isn't.-- scad mientist, Jan 08 2005 I couldn't think of a better way to describe it. Let's just call it sheet music with a built-in orchestra.-- Aq_Bi, Jan 08 2005 This would be wonderful. +-- sartep, Jan 09 2005 you could make these incredibly small, but I'm not sure I'd want to cope with the limited musical genres. (+).-- neilp, Jan 11 2005 random, halfbakery