Not as fun to read, outside the music industry. Lack of consistent samples has been MIDI's major issues, and even in games these days, nobody uses it, sadly.
MIDI 2.0 brings additional capabilities to device interconnection, and AFAIK has nothing to do with GM (which not many people care about anymore)
Professionals (musicians, engineers, etc) don't use MIDI as a general-purpose playback method, they use it to control their samplers, synths, external effects units etc.
They don't need "consistent samples" because they provide their own samples, different for every song (plus pure synth sounds, etc).
Basically, MIDI began as a protocol used between hardware devices. General MIDI is a product of the ROMpler era, a ROMpler being a sampler that can't be reprogrammed, i.e. what most people know as a "keyboard", and it's far from universal.
Musicians often don't care about standardising. They're hooking up all sorts of wonky instruments to their rig and reconfiguring it for one-off projects. There is often no need to recall specific patches after you've recorded the part you wanted.
edit: TCP -> HTTP.
MIDI has nothing to do with samples itself.
>and even in games these days, nobody uses it, sadly.
Most recorded music, soundtracks, and almost 100% of game music is been done with MIDI.
MIDI doesn't amount to the .mid files that people used to download / play on some player on their PC and which sound tinny.
It's a professional specification that's used in every single studio, and is the basis of every professional digital workstation for recording music and sequencing electronic instruments.
What you're describing is like confusing the JVM with Java applets, as if that's its only use.
If in your game you go the synthesis mode (chiptunes and whatnot) MIDI is a comunication protocol between devices.. if you want to use it to communicate a game with its own synthesis engine it makes less sense. Buy you may want MIDI so you compose in a standard music composing program.
It is used also in other areas that need automation, as lighting (DMX).
But I agree it would be nice to have better examples.
My 386 could do a decent job running DOS trackers (software synths) years before mp3’s were feasible on PC hardware (there was not enough storage, bandwidth or compute for MP3’s).
The Kosmic Free Music Foundation published a ton of music on one CD-ROM this way: