How'zit! I've made a few midi files on my computer that sound great, but when I put them on another computer they sound different. Not just different, worse. on the 3 other cpus I tried to play them on two of them played them wrong but one played them the same as my cpu would. Is this something to do with soundcards or something? Or have I made them wrong? Also, what does the type1, type0 midi format mean?

Take a look at all the options in the 'Sounds and Audio Devices' in your Control Panel Dir. There are alot of differences in quality between cards capabilities and midi settings (hardware acceleration).

Even different players on the same machine (with the same default settings) can sound different.

This is why we typically encode our recording to a format such as wave, or more commonly something compressed like mp3 or vorbis - rather than having each computer do it's best (or it's default in many cases [wink]) try at rendering the music from midi, everyone gets the recording as you intended it to sound (still excluding of course the differences in speaker setup/soundcard/etc).

Alternatively, you could try the mod format, which stores instrument information along with a midi-like track.

A midi file is just a file that tells which notes to play when and how. It also gives up instrumentt to use. Then the computer 'extracts' the instrument from your midibank and uses that one to play the notes defined in the midifile. Problem is, everyone uses another midiBank, and so other midibanks.

That's why some people find them sounding crappy and at your composerscomputer it sounds extremely well.

-Stenny

Ah I see.
Is there a program I need to download that can convert them to wav format,
or is there another way?

As far as I know, if you use ModPlug Tracker, you can convert MIDI files to various tracker formats (MOD, S3M, IT etc.) by just opening them as MIDI and saving in the appropriate format. I haven't tried this myself (and I'm not at my dev computer right now), but I think it saves the instruments for you. Unlike MIDI tracker formats contain the instrument sound data so the tracks should sound the same on any computer.