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I wrote a windows program many years ago, which created music by sending notes to the "midi mapper" (and thence to the midi-synth on my sound-card)

Today, I have a soft-synth which, allegedly accepts midi information, so I'd assume it should be possible to use today's equivalent of a midi-mapper to route the midi output from my program to the soft-synth.

There's clearly no longer a midi-mapper application in windows, but my program still works (on XP) in that it drives the built-in soundcard synth, so there must be some sort of midi handling layer in windows. How can I get at this? And maybe redirect the midi to the soft-synth?

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The default MIDI device can be set in Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices. If your soft-synth is registered as a MIDI device, you should be able to see it in the dropdown.

AFAIK most modern MIDI software now does its own MIDI routing from one device to another. Windows XP is limited in the number of MIDI devices it can support, and the MIDI software industry is gradually moving towards an all-USB model now.

In the USB model, many hardware controllers (such as this one) are "class-compliant", so you don't even need a special software driver to make them work.

For technical programming documentation about MIDI in Windows, this might be a good starting point.

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thanks ... I'll look into this –  interstar Apr 15 '10 at 15:58
"class-compliant" devices (like the one you linked to) are not HID devices - it means that they conform to a standard specification for USB MIDI devices, so they don't need a driver other than the default one that windows (or mac, or linux) ships. It's still MIDI messages all the way though. –  Eltariel Jun 15 '10 at 3:15
@Nathan: Thanks for the correction. –  Robert Harvey Jun 15 '10 at 4:23

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