Category: System Realtime
Purpose
Some master device that controls sequence playback sends this message to make a slave device start playback of some song/sequence from the beginning (ie, MIDI Beat 0).
Status
0xFA
Data
None
Errata
A MIDI Start always begins playback at MIDI Beat 0 (ie, the very beginning of the song). So, when a slave device receives a MIDI Start, it automatically resets its "Song Position" to 0. If the device needs to start playback at some other point (either set by a previous Song Position Pointer message, or manually by the musician), then MIDI Continue is used instead of MIDI Start.
Often, the slave device has its playback tempo synced to the master via MIDI Clock. See Syncing Sequence Playback.