Think of the MIDI file as the music partition and the SoundFont bank as the orchestra. Some games will sound better with one and not the other, but both are much better than the Windows default. I’ll cover the two because I find them both useful and there isn’t an option that covers all needs. It acts as a virtual cable between MIDI Player and MIDI Mapper. In order to connect the two programs, we’ll need loopMIDI. There are other options available up to Windows 7, but on Windows 8/10, and likely beyond, Microsoft has removed the native Windows MIDI Mapper and to the best of my knowledge this is the only option we have to change the MIDI source.

The next piece of software is CoolSoft MIDI Mapper, which allows you to select the MIDI source on your system.

I should mention here that there are other MIDI host options, but if you know them you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post. It is portable, so download it and extract it somewhere. It can also act as a MUNT emulator, although that’s a story for another time. It is a damn good piece of software with a score of options, and it can also act as a MIDI host-meaning it can play MIDI from any program on your system. When it comes to MIDI music, I use Falcosoft MIDI Player. spekkio might be interested in adding part of this to his list of game fixes and improvements. I imagine that most Codex regulars know this already, but I know there are many who don’t know yet about the various ways one can enhance MIDI music (using anything else than the default Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth is usually an improvement), or even why this is desirable. I’ve also decided to write a bit more on improving MIDI playback on Windows in general. The original post was rather informative but, as schru mentioned, it works up to Windows 7 but not on Windows 8/10. It may not have been necessary but I’ve decided to post an update to this thread.

Roland sound canvas sc-55