Song identification

[Herbert Chong]

i've been poking through my collection of MIDI files i downloaded in the early 90s (over 6000) and trying to identify some of the more obscure to me songs. i know some are original compositions too but between being a long time ago, no documentation, not being familiar with many genres of music, and 8.3 file names, i really don't know what a good number of these files are supposed to be. for instance this attached General MIDI file seems like it's an arrangement of something successful but trying to play the file and using Google to listen and identify the song doesn't get me anywhere. i have created WAV files and uploaded to some free services and they either come up with nothing or clear nonsense. is there some online service that does decently in identifying songs differently arranged than any of their commercial releases?

Herb...

M_SALLY.MID

[treesha]

Just a wild guess… that one might be mustang sally. No suggestions on song identification ideas. 

[OutrageProductions]

If you can construct a facsimile of the song as a 2mix (even using GM instruments) ; Shazam and/or Soundhound can probably identify them.

[Herbert Chong]

5 hours ago, treesha said:

Just a wild guess… that one might be mustang sally. No suggestions on song identification ideas. 

given the file name that's a strong possibility. I've got probably a couple thousand or so of these unidentified to me songs collected away. a good chunk are just poor sequences that i'll keep in the deep archives for now but some like this one are worth looking through and tuning to sound their best. my collected MIDI files are highly biased towards popular and well known songs with a small mixture of original compositions. the most difficult to figure out are the classical pieces because there are hundreds of allegros in the classical music repertoire and i'm just not that familiar with some composers so unless it's something I've liked listening to it's just a blank. the next most difficult are the ones that seem to be General MIDI demo released by companies to show off their new tone generators. the early 90s were when a wave of GM devices were just coming out and wavetable synthesis was just becoming mainstream. i was one of the early adopters getting a Roland SC-55 when it shipped. i just put it back into storage last week after verifying that it still works.

having said all that, i do know and have identified a few thousand already and moved the best performance sequences to a place to spend time working on. piles of the others are bad performances and i don't care what they are but i am reluctant to just discard them. disk space is cheap and MIDI files are small. modern MIDI file download places thankfully use long file names and give the entire song name. some people creating sequences even fill in the song title and composer along with their name on their MIDI files.

[Herbert Chong]

5 hours ago, OutrageProductions said:

If you can construct a facsimile of the song as a 2mix (even using GM instruments) ; Shazam and/or Soundhound can probably identify them.

i tried Google song identification and it mostly didn't recognize anything. i thought Shazam was paid. i didn't come across Soundhound. i will check them out more carefully.

[John Vere]

I too have possibly over 1,000 old midi files that I started collecting when they came on floppy’s in the 80’s. 
Generally the majority of free midi creations were done by very amateur musicians (?) so they are not even close to the original songs. I personally don’t think it’s worth your time to worry about them.

I think it’s 1 in 10 that are salvageable for me. 

And the internet AI normally doesn’t pick up on content of cover songs that are played by a band even if you do a decent job of it. A sparse sounding midi file will be miles away from detection as copy protected content. 
If you use even a few seconds of the original recording it will. 

I have posted dozens of You Tubes of either me playing cover songs or in tutorials on making backing tracks and I have only been busted once. Grandma got run over by a Reindeer! Go figure. 

I have a collection of 500 Beatles songs a friend bought on DVD. They are professionally produced GM midi and because I copied from the DVD they are not named. But because they were made properly the songs are instantly recognizable. 
So if you find a midi file that when you listen it is not recognizable do your self a favour. Delete it. 

Edited Tuesday at 02:56 PM by John Vere

[mettelus]

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

Generally the majority of free midi creations were done by very amateur musicians (?) so they are not even close to the original songs. I personally don’t think it’s worth your time to worry about them.

This was my reaction as well. If the performance wasn't great, song analyzers won't recognize them anyway. With 6000, that is a lot of time to invest in something. You can still download MIDI files if you putz around on the internet (sites like BitMidi, Midis101, and the like), so it may be a better route to seek out something you want to work with. Over the years, the MIDI renditions have gotten far better than they were 30 years ago. Also, MIDI files that were well done often have blank tracks in them with the song title, artist, and performers as track names. Those you can easily identify just by opening with Cakewalk if TTS-1 is enabled and no MIDI output is selected. I have a slew of MIDI files from that era too, many I listened to only once, I know what they are, and I have never even considered using them.

[John Vere]

The band in a box community is a great place to ask if anyone has a particular midi file as well as I think this is one I have used - free midi org. 
 

I have hundreds of midi files I created myself over the last 3 decades. I posted them on my website but I didn’t know if anyone was downloading them so I removed them. 

 

[Herbert Chong]

On 4/8/2025 at 12:15 PM, mettelus said:

This was my reaction as well. If the performance wasn't great, song analyzers won't recognize them anyway. With 6000, that is a lot of time to invest in something. You can still download MIDI files if you putz around on the internet (sites like BitMidi, Midis101, and the like), so it may be a better route to seek out something you want to work with. Over the years, the MIDI renditions have gotten far better than they were 30 years ago. Also, MIDI files that were well done often have blank tracks in them with the song title, artist, and performers as track names. Those you can easily identify just by opening with Cakewalk if TTS-1 is enabled and no MIDI output is selected. I have a slew of MIDI files from that era too, many I listened to only once, I know what they are, and I have never even considered using them.

true but that leaves hundreds and hundreds still worth working on and the really interesting ones to me are the classical pieces. things like the entire Beethoven symphony collection is available as fairly high quality MIDI files. and yes i have been collecting music -1 files for a long time. a fair number of what i have are clearly better than what's on BitMidi and Midis101. i came across PSR Tutorials and if that's any indication lounge music however well performed is still lounge music but there are some gems in there. too bad they require a Yamaha XG device to work properly and i am trying to stop using mine because its really old. the goal to me was always to develop an interesting and eclectic collection of music where i can replace one or more tracks with something i can play with my WX5 and a good physical modelling synth. i have the VL70-m from when it was new but i am moving to virtual physical modelling instruments. after all is said and done messing around and having fun is more important than performing for anyone else but me.

Herb...