From what Lothar says, he
does get the choice of MIDI ounput through his soundcard. I believe we have another case here of confusion over what it means to say a soundcard "has MIDI."
Lothar, your problem is simply that there is no device on your Audiophile to respond to MIDI messages and output music. It has a MIDI interface only.
MIDI is a software "language" that allows the transmission of musical performance-oriented information from one device to another. There are two main classes of devices involved here:
Something to play the music. Some devices create and respond to MIDI messages. The main example is a MIDI synthesizer, which interprets the MIDI messages and plays the appropriate notes at the appropriate times at the appropriate volume for the appropriate duration...
Something to transmit the messages. Other devices provide the pipeline to get the information from one place to another. The main example is a MIDI interface, which takes outgoing MIDI messages and sends them out cables to other devices, or receives incoming MIDI messages and converts them into their software representation on the computer...
Most inexpensive consumer soundcards contain both types of devices -- MIDI interfaces plus a simple MIDI synthesizer. But most better soundcards do
not have a MIDI synthesizer on board. Many don't even have a MIDI interface. They focus on their primary purpose, to be an excellent audio interface into the computer.
Some combine a MIDI interface and the audio hardware. The Audiophile is one such card. But very few, once you are out of the Sound Blaster price range, have on-board synths too.
There are two basic choices:
- have another piece of hardware to provide the MIDI playback -- an external synth, sampler, or even another soundcard in your computer. Lots of folks here use a cheal Sound Blaster Live as a MIDI instrument; I do this myself. With its capability to load sampled soundsets of the SOund Font format, it's really an amazingly useable synth for such a cheap device.
- Have a software synth loaded up on your PC. These are software programs that produce the sounds and send them to the audio stream of your soundcard. There are many goiod ones, but of course the require some of your computer's resources to run, and therefore reduce the available resources at your disposal for recording too. This is less and less of an issue all the time as computer processing power gets faster and RAM gets cheaper.
