midi player that can change instruments on the fly?

I grew up on cakewalk pro, and liked being able to change the "voice" instrument to something that suited me more, so I'm just wondering if there's a player or a way to do that that's more compact than cakewalk, since I don't want to edit anything other than that?

Closest I can think of is Timidity++. Basically it can emulate XG midi and with that, you can map more than one instrument to a single program.

You can use unsf to convert soundfonts to GUS pat sets. This way, you can edit and change instruments with a mere text editor and load the resulting pat set into Timidity++; you can record your own instruments into simple wav files and use those too. I had alot of fun doing this and I still have my pat sets that blow away 1+GB soundfonts (used unsf on various soundfonts free from the internet and made pat sets out of them, so I didn't record the instruments).

I get better midi than $3000.00+ midi modules with no noise, ground loops or cabling issues whatsoever (Timidity++ is all free software). And I can use it with Dosbox, Audacious music player, Doom, etc.

However, Timidity++ is more of a midi synthesizer-module emulator; but probably the best one. Using a text editor to change instruments may not be what you had in mind but maybe so.

It's a bit overpowered for what you want, but Reaper should be able to do that in a way very similar to Cakewalk. It's still lighter than it (7mb).

You can with this and the whole unzipped program is less than 1 megabyte.

Actually, I'd be surprise if there were any MIDI editor that did not allow you to change instrument mappings during playback.

yukib1t said:

It's a bit overpowered for what you want, but Reaper should be able to do that in a way very similar to Cakewalk. It's still lighter than it (7mb).

Aww, what happened to your super kawaii-desu pony avatar?

Thanks though.

Back on topic, any way of quickly being able to switch between soundfonts to compare them? Quickest I can think of is having multiple midi driver things (loopbe/bassmidi/etc) and keep restarting sound in zdoom. Since stopping the music and switching in a player would take longer.

invictius said:

Back on topic, any way of quickly being able to switch between soundfonts to compare them? Quickest I can think of is having multiple midi driver things (loopbe/bassmidi/etc) and keep restarting sound in zdoom. Since stopping the music and switching in a player would take longer.

Well, in ZDoom, you can use this. You need to set them up first of course, but that shouldn't be too hard. Advantage is that it works fine with both internal and external synths.

invictius said:

Aww, what happened to your super kawaii-desu pony avatar?

It was deemed heretical and replaced by a commissar.