Hello,

This file may not be corrupt at all. Just NOT a Standard Midi File.

You attached the file MARIE.RAR, I managed to extract from this archive file, and found MARIE.MID.

I had a quick look in the file, and as I said, this is certainly NOT any sort of SMF.

I would suspect that at some time you may have loaded your original .MID file into something, which CAN load a midi file but in fact defaults to it's own format. When you came to save it, you did not specify to save as SMF and the file was saved as it's own normal format, but (??) may have retained the .MID extension.

Anyway, you need to try to remember what software you had been using, maybe that system might load it, and then allow re-save as MIDI.

I'll study the file in detail, and see if there are any hints as to what it might be saved as. It does not seem to be any digital format, as the file is still only 16k.

Any hints you might offer would be a help.

If we can determine what format it might be, then it may not be 'corrupt' at all.

Geoff

Hm, I used a version of WinRAR on your file, and it seemed to go through the motions of unpacking the file, but I think that it's still compressed.

I don't normally use WinRAR, as it's proprietary software, and different versions of the software do not handle compressed files reliably, I find. For example, an archine made by the latest version may not work correctly with an older version of WinRAR.

So another possibility may be that the original midi files have been archived at some time, and you need to find out what with.

Midi files, and often other formats of music software, usually contain some sort (even if occasional) of recognisable text. Your file contains no hint of anything like this, so it may not be anything made by a different sequencer or DAW system. Hence I'm wondering if it's still compressed in some way. In fact, there is not that much difference between your original MARIE.RAR and the supposedly (but maybe not) extracted/uncompressed MARIE.MID.

Geoff

The file MARIE.MID appears to be encrypted.

As Geoff and Clemens have already stated, the RAR file when uncompressed resulting in MARIE.MID is not in any way recognisable as a MIDI file.
Neither does it seem anything like any proprietary DAW files that I'm aware of.
Perhaps looking at how the files were created and discovering whether there's a conversion program for them might be the answer.
JohnG.

You can upload some other file to test, I don't think it's compressed because you see very long zero sequences that would disappear when compressed.

Carlos, yes, good point. There's a number of sequences of a single char, various different chars involved, that a compression process would love to act on. So yes, this would rule out any compression process.

Yes, another example would help. Nice if it was NOT a RAR variant, can you try a simpler .ZIP file?

Geoff

I have some more information about this file:

I get a message saying the "MThd expected" and "bad format" when I try to load the file.

Thanks again.

Quite. Any process that tries to process the file as if it was a midi file SHOULD complain about these things. The file is NOT a midi file.

The 'MThd' label indicates the start of the file header chunk. It's not there, so you get an error message.

Geoff

Not only is there no "MThd" to start the file, there are no "MTrk" track markers in the file.

JohnG.