I have spent a little too much time lately surfing the Wayback Machine and nosing around for “alternative rock” MIDIs still available for download. Now that I have a few hundred of them, I’d like to go through and pipe them through hardware and see which ones transcend the format and which just use the trumpet for the vocal track. Maybe one does both!!!!!!!!! (There’s a version of Black Hole Sun that really elevates the harmonica and I’m not kidding.)

Anyway. Perhaps you would like to join! Here’s the Universal Resource Locator for all that: https://www.twitch.tv/rappyland

Here's the VOD, but be forewarned that the jacked-up bootleg NDI stream I set up to pipe the audio work across my apartment to the streaming PC started collapsing midway through the stream (though checking "hardware acceleration" towards the last third seems to have fixed things), so I dunno how it all holds up to a rewatch. RIYL network jitter!

I collected all these files individually over the course of a couple of weeks by sifting through Waybacked links pages and file metadata, so in lieu of linking out each file I will instead proffer my primary sources:

• The MIDI Farm (ca. 2000) (extremely excellent header images here)
• Planet MIDI (ca. 1999)
• Reaper's MIDI page (ca. 2001)
• MIDI FLOOR (ca. 1998) (less useful MIDI-wise than the others but contains brutally powerful HTML energy)
• The MidiWeb™: Homepage of the MIDI Community (ca. 2000)

Proper links to captured audio to come in a future post, I'm going back and dumping everything into Reaper in full now.

MIDI Composer Websites Perused

• You're finally at Julio Lema's small place in the Cyberspace.
  • Julio was responsible for those eyewateringly-sick Black Sabbath MIDIs
• Hobby Time
  • This is Julio's page from a few years later, using (as @boodoo pointed out) a visibly-turn-of-the-millennia generic "hobby blog" template
• Anti-Elevator MIDI Files
  • The hobbyist blog of David Daiganeault, AKA sargpepp67@aol.com, hands-down the most talented cover MIDI composer
• The Pepper Sound Factory, Inc.
  • The (sadly mostly-decayed) homepage for David's business, which sold original MIDI compositions for business websites or video games, available by fax in Germantown, MD.

MIDI Rulings
As per traditional standards, MIDIs were filed into three categories: Rock, Rot, and Rule. For alternative MIDIs, we reasoned, to Rock is to provide a listenable and faithful version of the song in question; to Rot is to fail to do so; to Rule is to fail to do so, but in a positive, transformative, sometimes-breathtaking, and possibly-accidental manner.

The complete list, in a big-ass Markdown table, under the cut: