Is there a Midi PC file music player for Amiga?

[bubblebobble]

The midi format does not come with samples. The GM MIDI standard defines at minimum 16 voices. MODs have only 4. So a converter is kind of difficult, first it must choose the samples from some kind of sample pool (Windows has this indeed pre-installed, and many sound cards have them on-board). Plus, MIDI has a lot fo information that a MOD cannot capture. So better leave the file MIDI rather than trying to convert.

On the Amiga the best midi Player is Timidity, it is pretty decend and sounds definetly better than the Windows Standard Sounds. It leaks of DSP stuff like Reverb and Chrous, but comes with good samples. I can be found on Aminet.
Warning: Anything less than a 60/50Mhz might be to slow for playback. But you can alos offline-convert the midi files to .wav.

[bubblebobble]

Deluxe Music Construction Set is a Sequencer, that can read and write MIDI filesto a certain extent.
It is not a General MIDI player.

Note the difference:

- MIDI is THE protocol to transfere musical data in realtime (such as Note on/off, Pitch Bend etc.)
- ".mid" Files are files, that have those data "frozen" with timestamps into a file, almost all serious music programs support this format.

To make this "data" audible, you need a musical instrument that is midi capable. A software synthesizer can replace this hardware, but requires significant CPU power.

MIDI does not specify what kind of sample/instrument should play the data. MIDI is usually used in a fix MIDI environment, so this is not really needed.
To exchange .mid files betweens people, e.g. to use it for games, there is a later standard called General MIDI (published first time 1991, AFTER the Amiga).
This defines for each program number (a MIDI definition) a certain, fix for all times, instrument.
E.g. program #1 shall be an acoustic piano. (whatever you do now with this information)

So if you want to play such files without HW, you need a player plus a software synthesizer that is General MIDI aware.
Deluxe Music Construction Set is not General MIDI aware, and supports only 4(?) channels. In MIDI, you are not limited to any number of cannels. The General MIDI standard says, that a device shall have at least 16 channels.

And what now?

- No, you can not play back .mid files (in sense of making them directly audible) on an off the shelf Amiga500/1200, it is too slow and has not enough memory.

- Yes, you can play it back on a 60/50Mhz when you use a program like Timidity, that contains about 15MB of samples.
Forget all other players on Amiga. Actually there is only GMPlay, which is a very early and buggy port of Timidity IIRC.

You can convert .mid files into MODs, but not automatically, this requires manual tweaking of the channel usage and a careful selection of the samples. The result might sound quite different from the .mid file played back via MIDI HW.

[bubblebobble]

Deluxe Music can assign some midi channels to samples, that's right. But that doesn't mean it can play General MIDI files straight away. It doesn't even know what GM is, it was released before the GM Standard was defined.
You would need to manually pick up samples that suit the instruments and remove as many musical notes that it fits the 4-voice Paula "synthesizer". Pretty much the same as if you would use a tracker.

MIDI Playback can be damn expensive, much more expensive than an mp3, it depends what features are supported and what not. If you cut it down to MOD specs, like 8bit samples, 4 Channels and no effects what so ever, it can be played. But that requires manual adjustment to give reasonable output. If you do this automatically, the result will be probably very bad, depeding on the .mid file of course.
If you have a .mid file that uses only 4 voices at a time, it can be perfectly mapped to a MOD. If it uses 50 or 100 voices, you need to manually decide which instruments are less important an can be dropped, and where to "steal" the voice when there are not enough available.

With the 16 "channels" in my above posting I ment, that a device needs to be able to play 16 voices at the same time to be allowed to carry the GM logo.
Don't mix this up with the 16 MIDI channels, this is the "number of tracks" you can use, but they don't necessarily need to play all at the same time. On the other hand, unlike a MOD, one track can play as many musical notes as it wants, while a MOD can play only 1.

Btw, the MIDI format is much more powerful than MOD, this is a common misunderstanding. It just doesn't come with samples. If you use bad samples, it sounds ridicoulus of course, while within a MOD the samples are choosen by the composer and do always fit. If you don't use General MIDI, it isn't even defined what samples/instruments to use. MIDI was just never ment to share the instruments (and therefore be dependent on a certain format of handling instruments), just the musical notes.
E.g. when you compose music using real (analog) synthesizers, there is no sample involved during the generation of the actual audio, so how could you store this in the .mid file? Think of a .mid file like some musical notes printed out on paper.