I prefer using TiMidity which you can find on TiMidity package To run the TiMidity player, you will also need some good quality sound fonts which are freely available from Big Soundfont. You will need to edit the timidity.cfg file to indicate the location of the sound font. Here is an example of the configuration file.
You should use a simple text editor such as vi, emacs, notepad, or notepad+.
In order to diagnose problems with timidity on Windows, you should check the console output illustrated below.
The console is accessible by clicking on the 'CON' button for the timw32g.exe program.
There are a few minor issues with TiMidity on Windows. For example, it does not load midi files which have an apostrophe embedded in the file name. The abcmidi link refers to the location of the executables midi2abc and midicopy. The dot indicates that the files are in the same folder as midiexplorer. There are four other links to the midi players and the active player is indicated by radiobuttons on the left. Most of the players do not take any run time options. On Linux, I include the options '-A 50 -B2,12 -ik' for TiMidity.
Please note that on Windows PC, some of the folders such as Program Files (x86) may be hidden by default. You may need to change the options on the File Explorer to make them visible.
There are a few file name issues with some of the midi players. TiMidity does not like file names which have an embedded apostrophe -- for example You Keep Me Hangin'On.mid. The Windows Media Player fails when you attempt to play another file with the same file name. In order to circumvent these problems, midiexplorer produces a temporary midi file with a random file name before sending it to the midi player. As long as midiexplorer exits normally, the temporary midi file will be deleted the next time you play another midi file or extract. All the temporary midi files begin with the letter x and are followed by 16 random letters or numbers. (This makes it easy to find them.) This page was last updated on July 25 2019