One of the oldest (and I might say one of very few) Windows "accessory programs" I have used since we added central heat to an early cave is called "midicolors" and when I got it it was a free download for subscribers to PC Magazine. They still have a "gimmicks" site, but I believe they now charge something like $9.95(US) per download.

It came as a .zip single file only 365 KB in size, that unzips to about 206 KB in a half dozen run files when you double click it. (The zip is bigger than the running files because the source code is included, which would be of possible interest if you've thought about writing your own utility, or maybe wanted to reconstruct it to show "visual guitar tab instead of piano keyboards.)

If you put a shortcut icon on your desktop, you can just drag a .mid file onto the icon, and click the play button when the program pops up.

It shows a "master" piano keyboard on which the whole .mid file is played, but for .mid files with several "voices" it also shows a separate keyboard for each voice. The keys "move and highlight" the notes as they're played.

A very handy feature is that you can turn the individual voices on/off with a single click on each keyboard (and turned off, a voice is removed from the sound output, so you can separate the voices both visually and audibly.) There's also a "tempo" control where you can change the tempo in a single box that's right up front.

Some "professional quality" (i.e. better than the ones I write) midi files contain so many different voices all moving in different directions that it can be difficult to "separate out" the even melody, and being able to turn the various voices on/off easily is a tremendous help in simplifying them, and for identifying chord structures.

The tempo change button is a big help if you're trying to learn a tune, and although nearly any scoring program lets you change the tempo and turn voices on/off, the controls in the program are a lot quicker and simplr than in most editing programs.

I find the piano keyboard display a convenient way of "visualizing" the midi structure and the "put together" of the tune. Others might wish for something different

My "original zip file" indicates a date of 2002, and the current listing for the download is the same. Recollection is that I had it at about the time that I upgraded to Win95, and it still runs in Vista/Win7, althugh it looks a little different in each Win version.

I haven't kept my subscription up to date and seldom look for helper files, but the Download Menu Site still lists it (look in the alpha listing under "M"). I haven't looked at whether the same site has anything else "interesting."

(Actual download page)

With the exception of the keyboard display of each individual voicing, it doesnt' do anything that's not in any decent scoring/midi program, but it's been very convenient for the "quick-n-dirty" look at midi files for planning how to deconstruct them for personal purposes.

Certainly not a necessity if you have a decent score/midi editor, and the download fee makes it much less attractive than when it was free; but it's been handy for me, although I keep it on the desktop more for the nostalgia than for anything I've done much of recently. (So far it's lasted 13% of a lifetime and still works, which is fairly impressive for any computer stuff.)

A quetion is whether this is the kind of stuff you had in mind for the thread.

John