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Recovering old MIDI files

MarkRMarkR
in Other

I'm appealing to the great brain trust here in hopes that someone has a plausable answer.

I recently found an old back-up disc that has a bunch of midi files I'd forgotten about. They were created wayyy back on Mac OS9, but on OSX show up as "unix executable" files and cannot be opened. Some Googling resulted in "change the suffix to .mid and it should work" (it doesn't), to "you need a Mac running OS9" (oh lovely).

Has anyone here ever dealt with this? Thanks.

Comments

  • BiancaNeveBiancaNeve

    Mac os9 emulator?

  • SamuSamu

    Adding extension (.mid) to those files should work (I've done that with old midi files).

    If 'double click' to launch them doesn't work bring up the show-info dialogue for the file, select the app you wish to open them with and click 'apply to all'.

    After renaming you could also try to 'import' the file to an app that is known to handle midi-files.
    QuickTime & Spotlight used to be able to 'preview' Midi-Files but that functionality is long gone now, it was oddly enough removed in Quicktime X.(I suspect that the Apples Roland GM/GS 'license' expired with QuickTime 9 so they decided to remove it).

  • SamuSamu

    In the old 'classic' days it was also pretty common to compress files to save space (yes, even small files were compressed). So it could be that those old extension-less files are .sit archives.
    (If that's the case change extension to .sit and use The Unarchiver to extract those, get it from the AppStore https://theunarchiver.com).

    If you can upload a few of them so more of us can take a look and maybe come up with a solution...

  • yowzayowza

    I remember having to do something weird in HexEdit to get certain files to open correctly in OS 9 but I don't recall if I had to do that with MIDI files.

  • SamuSamu

    @yowza said:
    I remember having to do something weird in HexEdit to get certain files to open correctly in OS 9 but I don't recall if I had to do that with MIDI files.

    Matching/Changing Type & Creator codes was common when files would not open properly :)
    (Even Midi-Type 0 & 1 had different Type-Codes which could easily turn into a mess when downloading *.mid files).

  • TelefunkyTelefunky
    edited June 2018

    'unix executable' is OSX's standard response for 'I dunno'
    As a first step I always open 'unknown' files by a texteditor. Even without anything readable the pattern of (garbage) characters often gives a hint.
    There may be type information in the very first characters, or the way of encoding etc.
    ps: if no solution shows up, I have a running OS9 system here

  • MarkRMarkR

    Thanks everyone!

    I've reminded myself that they are Cubase files, though definitely midi-only.

    @Telefunky Here's the top bit of text from one:

    HººFπÄıpFπÄ∏Wº"ºFπ†>†ÏˆËËóxA%d>ˇˇ˝@ˇ√PU ˇ˛
    +ËInstr EndscS101p3#∞F@

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    W4008aRcH8WindowSaveList≤TrackmixStore
    ArrangeStore\
    MonitorStoreTransportStoreÄÄdX™zÄ∏i≠(


    ^N7 ≠ÄBÊ9Äd]#!ßSongledH1000


    L200êê@PXê@PXê@PXê@PXˇˇˇˇ

    !"#$%&'()+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[];^_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ Noname !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ Noname

    !"#$%&'()    +,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[];^_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ Noname !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ NonameS300PˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇËu0u0
    @u0S400<;S500†&ÅCÅiÅiÅiÅiÅiÅiÅiM200 ƒËUntitledD400–General MIDID102Äc

  • MarkRMarkR

    @Samu said:

    If you can upload a few of them so more of us can take a look and maybe come up with a solution...

    Interesting. When I go to attach a file all of these ones are greyed out. Drag 'n drop results in a message saying "File format is not allowed".

    Ok, I've added "Claire d'Lune" to Google Drive:

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XAWA2SWZy3Z7oLOXiEQo7LtXWUImzfS8

  • SamuSamu

    @MarkR said:

    Ok, I've added "Claire d'Lune" to Google Drive:

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XAWA2SWZy3Z7oLOXiEQo7LtXWUImzfS8

    That's definitely NOT a standard Midi-File (it lacks the proper header inside the file for starters).

    Macintosh Cubase VST/24 4.0.0 was the identifiers I could find so maybe a 'modern' version of Cubase on would be able to import the files? :)

  • SevenSystemsSevenSystems
    edited June 2018

    Heh, pasting binary data into a forum post... this is THE definitive quality assurance test for the forum software :D

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