Still WAV
I remember the day I bought the SC-88Pro.
Late 1990s. That Roland sound module was my entry into desktop music. I learned the words GM and GS here. Program Change switched instruments. Control Change added expression. MIDI's spec was simple. The more I understood, the more the sound responded.
My sequencer was Voyetra's MIDI Orchestrator Plus. Piano roll and score editor in one. I couldn't read sheet music, but if I placed notes on the piano roll, the score appeared. It came bundled with a Sound Blaster, I think. Not powerful, but more than enough for a beginner.
Hardware sound modules gave way to software synths. Opportunities to hear the SC-88Pro's patches faded. The term "GS" stopped coming up. Sequencers consolidated around Cubase and Logic. Ableton Live and FL Studio captured new audiences. Veterans like Voyetra and Opcode Vision disappeared.
Then came the age of VST plugins.
Creative freedom exploded. But behind it, chaos. iLok, Native Access, Steinberg Activation Manager. Every vendor, every storefront, a different licensing scheme. One plugin demands a USB dongle. Another requires cloud activation. Every time you replace a machine, a migration chore awaits. You're exhausted before you make any music.
The hardest part is that playback environments can't be shared.
Musicians craft sounds in their own DAW, with their own plugins, their own signal chains. That obsession is what makes music personal. I get it. But hand someone your project file, and if they don't have the same plugins, nothing plays. The only thing you can reliably share is stems bounced to WAV. A new format called DAWproject appeared, but Logic, Ableton, and Pro Tools don't support it. In 2026, the common language of music is still WAV files.
In the MIDI era, any PC with a GM sound module could play the same song. The sound was thin. But there was a common language. Today the sound is incomparably better. But the common language is gone.
Maybe someday plugins will run in the cloud and environment differences will vanish. That would mean restructuring the entire industry. As long as every company locks users into its own ecosystem, WAV files remain the lingua franca.
The SC-88Pro is now an iOS app. Was an iOS app. An OS update broke compatibility, and it no longer runs. The MIDI files, the patches, gone from my pocket. The common language was lost twice.