Adding MIDI Guide to your project

MIDI Guide is free to use in any commercial or personal project.

April 30, 2026

I've met a few people who had heard of MIDI Guide, but weren't sure if they were allowed to use the dataset. This made me realize that just linking to the project's 500-line LICENSE.md wasn't cutting it, and that I need to do a better job explaining the project's allowed uses.

I'll do my best here to first explain the license, and then to explain my intentions and hopes for the project.

The dataset's license

I'm not a lawyer, so you shouldn't take this as legal advice, but here is my best effort at explaining the license that covers the MIDI Guide dataset, which is the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Your rights

  1. You can use the MIDI Guide dataset in ANY project, including for-profit, commercial projects.

  2. You don't need our explicit permission, or a special contract with us, or anything like that, to use the dataset in your project. You can just use it.

  3. You can use the dataset in any way you like (rehost it, ship a copy of it with your device, convert it to JSON, use it to power an API, etc.).

  4. It's free to use the dataset.

Your obligations

  1. You need to credit MIDI Guide somewhere sensible, with a link to the project's website. This is usually a line in a product's manual, or in an app's About screen

  2. If you use this dataset to build your own even bigger, more 'comprehensive' dataset, your resulting dataset needs to use this same license.

The project's goal

I want every sequencer, controller, app, tool, and toy that could benefit from MIDI Guide's dataset to use it.

When I started MIDI Guide, I made it free and open because it was worth much more as a shared resource than if I tried to keep it for myself. The need for this information in a structured format is broad, and obvious. It doesn't make sense that we should each need to re-create it ourselves.

MIDI Guide being free and open means others feel good about contributing to it, and safe about using it.

Even if one was of the mind that this information should be non-free, trying to keep a dataset like this from being free is a lost cause. To be useful, the dataset still needs to be available via public endpoint, or shipped to end users within an app or firmware, where clever people will always be able to get at it.

And aside from being guaranteed to fail, trying to put DRM around what's essentially a phonebook for synths isn't very chill.

If your project could benefit from the MIDI Guide dataset, I hope this convinces you to go ahead and use it!

-Ben

This dataset is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.