lixlpixel's Journal: midi sounds great - compilation on a floppy

Berlin label festplatten released Festplatten1.44 - the ultimate 3,5" compilation, which is a one hour 13 minutes compilation of various electronic music artists.

They say: "although everyone is searching for the 'fat' sound, especially in techno music, it is still the arrangement that makes music interesting... we prove it by putting 13 tracks out as general midi files, to be played with the cheap internal sounds of every soundcard in your computer. and it works!"

And i have to say - it's impressive.
Although i don't have a floppy drive and therefore miss out on the sensation of actually handling the 1.44MB of groove, the tracks sound great (and not only because i like the genre, i mean it "sounds" great).

They received some attention in german media (google translation) and it begs for the question why there is always the association of "cheap" with midi.
The sounds of general midi standard are made by Roland, the legendary sythesizer manufacturer (which produced the 303, 808, 909 u.a and is therefore partly responsible for the most of techno music), and if you listen to these tracks, you can clearly hear that.

I use a plug in called Volume Logic and it makes these ~30kb files sound like any "regular" track, rich and "fat" as festplatten claims...

Could this improve the use of music on the web where still every byte counts?
Is this the end of "i have to turn this off asap" midi abuse on websites?