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If you're handling it all yourself, I think you'd be better off coming up with your own format... MIDI is an old, gross binary format with lots of baggage. The main usage for this, I would imagine, would be to get a MIDI file out for use with some other application (despite being ugly, it is a standard format and has wide support).

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The problem with that is that MIDI is a very strong standard, as bad as the format itself might be. Every single synth or keyboard out there exports to MIDI, and most of the time ONLY to MIDI.

Also, the MIDI format is not slow to generate or to read, it is actually designed for speed (and may other perks) and any implementation of it would be very likely faster than any other format you could come up with. Of course, you would still have to deal with its complications and the many particularities and edge-cases it has.

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