Ancient Web: Mark Headrick Kept a MIDI Jukebox Through Browser-Plugin Extinctions

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The sound of an old homepage was often whatever MIDI your sound card managed to play. Mark Headrick not only kept a MIDI library; he documented the long, awkward effort to keep browsers playing it.

Visit Mark Headrick's personal site.

Its menu still connects a guestbook, SETI@home, Sound Blaster notes, programming, IRC, NASCAR, hardware, a personal role-playing game, and separate MOD and MIDI music pages. Even after the addition of a modern blog, the old homepage remains a collection of interests rather than a narrow commercial product.

At the top sits a random MIDI player and jukebox controls. The General MIDI page organizes individual files by genres including classical, country, dance, heavy metal, New Age, rock, and television themes. Headrick says most are other people's arrangements, not compositions he created. His claim that they are public-domain files should not be treated as a legal determination of each arrangement's rights.

Every browser upgrade broke the band

The most valuable part of the MIDI page might be its update notes. Headrick explains that it originally relied on the Crescendo plugin in Netscape; then came Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. By 2013 he was documenting Firefox changes affecting plugin discovery. In 2017 he wrote that Firefox's removal of old plugin support had broken another solution.

A 2021 entry explains his new combination of browser extensions, a virtual MIDI synthesizer, and soundfont support in Windows 10. These are historical troubleshooting notes, not instructions that have been confirmed to work on current operating systems.

His own small RESET.MID file was meant to solve a more obscure problem: some MIDI files left instruments or notes stuck, so the next file sounded wrong. He describes trying to create a musical equivalent of a sequencer's panic button.

These details reveal an important lost category of Web labor. Personal-site authors did not merely upload media; they fought operating systems, plugins, sound cards, and browser changes to keep an experience accessible.

The archive still includes a welcome message, visitor count, and the occasional unapologetic opinion about a song. It belongs to an Internet in which the webmaster's personality and the site's playback requirements were inseparable.

Browse the MIDI categories and playback history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.