The only really strange thing I heard in this class was that MIDI is old and uncommon. This struck me because, while MIDI 1.0 was released on February 1 1983, MIDI 2.0 was released on January 17 2020. In that time, it has become the only mainstream standard. What niche alternatives also exist include Control Voltage for those with thousands of dollars in modular hardware, tracker modules (.MOD, .XM, .S3M, .IT, etc.), and a few proprietary formats might still exist in limited use.

This web page uses a screenshot of OpenMPT running on my Linux laptop through WINE, though this is not best practice and I actually use such software on Windows. OpenMPT is a tracker, and as such, it makes "modules", that is, while it can render songs in the usual PCM formats, its project files also act as highly compact playback, storing the PCM data and instrument programming for individual sampler and sometimes softsynth instruments, as well as note data, in one file rather than linking to others, to allow the song to be reconstructed in playback from this one low-size file. This was vital due to the low memory, storage, and network bandwidth of computers in the past. Due to improved performance, trackers are now mostly a niche workflow alternative.