Many years ago, before standard MIDI files, I used a primitive, floppy disk drive, sequencer in a Yamaha keyboard. It wrote MIDI files in the Yamaha proprietary language, as there was no standard.
Standard MIDI files came out, but I was already invested in this keyboard with hundreds of songs. Then one day, the keyboard died, and I lost about 300 songs. Once standard MIDI files came around, everybody adopted it, and abandoned the old proprietary languages.
From then on, I have never purchased anything that didn't save in a standard format. I bought Master Tracks Pro that saves in proprietary mtp format, but also saves in .mid, so everything gets saved in standard MIDI files. Audio gets saved in WAV or for on stage, high rez mp3.
This month I am redoing a few of my older songs that were saved in Standard MIDI but an early version, before General MIDI, so I'm changing drum note numbers, and making them better. I've learned a lot about making music since the 1980s.
That's also the reason I tend to rely on hardware MIDI instead of software synths. I have songs with sounds from the TX81z, MT-32, i3 and other old machines. Some of them are as old as Windows 3.1 and DOS 5. Operating systems have improved, and just about everything from those days won't work on a modern computer. But I still have those songs and those sounds. Sure, some of the sounds are dated, and a lot of them sound lame today, but others still sound stellar and can't be reproduced by more modern synths.
So my sympathy goes out to all who are using the soon to be orphaned Finale. If the files are proprietary, start exporting while it's still working.
Notes ♫
