MightyKitten said:
Midi-Player: vanBosco Midi player
http://www.vanbasco.com/
vanBasco is good, but it is not the best freeware midi player.
Megamid 166 is the best.
Disadvantages: It is a DOS program, so you cannot do anything else
simultaneously on your computer.
It needs some manual ini file setting up for your sound card.
You may want to change the background picture to something more neutral, I
use a plain gray background.
So, what are the advantages, after all these disadvantages?
Well, it is simply beautiful, and gives you more visual information than
any other midi player.
It lets you _see_ music instead of just hearing it.
The main part of the display are 16 keyboards which show every tone played
on every instrument, with the volume of each tone shown as different color
intensity. You can see visually how the music is built up with chords and
harmonies. You can even see pitch bending if you switch that on.
The color bars are bending like this ( ) to show pitch bending downwards
and upwards.
If it is a midi karaoke file you are playing the text scrolls by below the
keyboards, with a little jumping ball telling you exactly when to sing each
part of each word.
You can also see all the pedals and switches the player is using on each
keyboard, moving in real time.
You can slow down or speed up the music, or change the key up and down.
You can change each instrument while it is playing.
There are more nice stuff too, but those are the main features.
Most download sites are down now, and even google has lost the memory of
it, but megamid 166 for DOS is still available here:
http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/tom/megamid/download.htm
Other links:
http://www.neutrio.com/megamid_dos/index.htm
http://megamid.cjb.net/
There are also newer versions, for windows, versions 0.23 and 0.24 but they
are only partially converted from the real Megamid for DOS.
I was in contact with the programmer, Chee Keat, and he hoped we would one
day have time to complete the conversion to windows, but I haven't heard
from him for years now.
It is too bad if this masterpiece of programming is lost and forgotten.
