I am developing a typical space shoot-em-up game with sounds (duh) and background music. I use .wav files for the sound effects and MIDI (.mid) files for the background music. The sound effecs are about at the same volume so there isnt an explosion blowing your speakers while the missle cant be heard. With the sound effects balanced, however, you can't even hear my MIDI files well at all. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

Are you using a certain middleware solution for your audio? What audio engine? Are you working directly with DirectX?

To answer those questions might help us diagnose the midi problem.

The proper way for you to make sure all your FX work correctly is to have them properly mastered in an audio editor, that way you can set a general "FX Volume" and not worry about the individual files. Or you could indeed have each one with a % of total volume setting in the code, but I think that would be unwieldy.

Best as I can figure is, your FX are playing so loud that youve got your main windows/sound card settings turned down and as such are losing your other sounds, but for all I know there could be a MIDI Volume setting or something.

Thanks, I went to volume control and adjusted the SW Synth and turned the Wave setting down.

I would suggest looking into how you can get ahold of those controls from within your program, so you could have settings in your menus to control those levels for the end user as well.