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Source. The autoplay incantation is verbatim from oocities.org/timessquare/1090 and the inline LiveAudio tag from oocities.org/area51/1210, both GeoCities mirrors. The byte counts and track counts were measured with stat on the files themselves, not from transfer sizes, because a compressed transfer undercounts: this one reported 11,781 bytes for a 42,859 byte file before it was caught. The autoplay rules are from the W3C Web Audio API 1.1 specification and Chrome's published autoplay policy, which has gated Web Audio since Chrome 71. The two copyright layers and the sequencer's case are from Wikimedia's legal analysis of MIDI files and from that sequencer's own account on his site. All files are in reference/4-construction/midi/.

Two things here ship, and both are licensed for it. The player is webaudio-tinysynth 1.1.3 by g200kg, Apache-2.0, rehosted with its license file alongside as that license requires. It was chosen because it needs no soundfont at all: every timbre is generated from oscillators, so there are no samples and no external requests. That thin synthetic sound is correct rather than a compromise, since a modern General MIDI soundfont would render these files far better than any 1996 sound card managed. The six pieces are all from the Mutopia Project and all marked Public Domain on their own catalog record rather than inherited from a site-wide statement: Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze from BWV 208 via the 1881 Breitkopf edition, and five Scott Joplin rags and waltzes typeset from their original 1902 to 1914 editions. Mutopia generates its MIDI from the typeset source with LilyPond rather than performing it by hand, which is what keeps the sequence layer clean as well as the composition.

Nothing else in the folder is playable here, on purpose. The GeoCities and windows95.com files are unlicensed on both layers at once: an arrangement of a copyrighted composition, plus an anonymous sequencer's own unassigned rights. Preservation by an archive is not a license grant. One of them is worth naming anyway: the windows95.com theme was a commissioned original, credited on the page to a named composer with a link to his own site. The shareware hub had a house composer, which is a better fact than the pirated-MIDI folklore that usually stands in for this era.

Deliberately absent. Any claim about how common site music was, when it peaked, or when browsers removed the tags. None of that is in these captures. <bgsound> still parses in browsers today and simply does nothing, which is a different thing from being removed.

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