Ultralight MIDIPlayer

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which can pretty much give you a hint of what these files and technical standards are. Unlike audio files, MIDIs actually contains data that allows you to play them as you would a real-life musical instrument, provided you have the right software, of course.

But every once in a while, you may get tired of music production and want to do something really weird with a MIDI, like visualize it at high speed in a soundless video. Like being confused? Well, then you’ll certainly like Ultralight MIDIPlayer.

Understanding what Ultralight MIDIPlayer (or UMP) does isn’t exactly rocket science; it visualizes the various notes played in a MIDI file as if they were falling blocks on a piano key, or lines that move from one side of the screen to another, or combinations of number and letters. You have many options when it comes to rendering the MIDI track, and these even include a resource pack that comes with the program and allows you to change color notes.

You can increase the speed at which a song is played, or the render interval which you can use to make the visuals look rather “glitchy”. Let’s say you’re probably having fun with this. You now want to record a video of this abstract digitalized ballet, right?

First off, in order to make a video, you need to download FFmpeg, a tool for converting, streaming or recording video and sound, known by many developers. While this will enable you to render a video, the result will have no sound, something UMP specifies right at the top of the “Render to Video” window.

It’s very difficult to intuit Ultralight MIDIPlayer’s exact purpose. You may be interested in it if you’re looking to make some artsy and abstract visuals for your own musical pieces.