Taken from the Roland SCC-1 Owner's Manual , page 14.

The MIDI standard came about because people wanted to be able to transmit digital music performance data from one instrument to another, no matter who manufactured it or what kind of instrument it was played on. This compatibility opened up new vistas in the world of electronic musical instruments. Banks of instruments played automatically by sequencers and computer music the way we know it today would not have been possible without MIDI.

In the compromises that finally led to the general acceptance of the MIDI standard, parts of it were left purposely vague. This gave individual manufacturers leeway to design their own features within the overall MIDI standard, but also led to occasional troublesome inconsistencies. For example, there is a standard describing how to send a signal for tone changing using program change message, but because there was no agreement on standard for the kind of tone generated by a given program change number, this assignment varies randomly from one piece of equipment to the next. In practice, this means that a program change message in the performance data used to play a particular instrument on one sound source will instead play a completely different instrument, or none at all, on a different sound source.

The GS Format concept was developed to resolve this kind of problem. Any sound module certified GS-compatible will correctly play back song data that was written for a different sound module, also certified as GS-compatible (We will call the devices with the GS mark "GS sound sources").

For more information on the GS format, check out what Roland International has to say. To return to this page, just hit the "Back" button on your browser.

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