I installed a sb0730 Sound Blaster "Xtreme" Gamer and cant get MIDI sound to work properly. All other sound is working fantastically well but MIDI sound doesn't work right. I can go into control panel and change the MIDI music playback device under Sounds and audio properties to: *1 SB X-FI Synth A [EF00] (The notes and instruments are very wrong but the music is just recognizable) *2 SB X-FI Synth B [EF00] (A bit better but still wrong.) *3 Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth (The sounds are correct but sound terrible) When I had Realtek drivers installed for the on board sound MIDI sounded acceptable. The current installation is clean and has only the Creative Drivers so this isn't likely a conflict. Another card of the same type also had this problem. This is not a post about MIDI ports, external MIDI hardware, or MIDI composing software but about how the system plays MIDI files.
what are you using to play MIDI? When I tried running an old version of cubase VST I had to turn my Xtreme gamer to Audio Creation Mode before I could get midi to be recognised an work properly. Have you checked midi playback in Dxdiag?
I was using Cave Story http://www.cavestory.org/ which is a free game that uses MIDI for its excellent soundtrack. After a driver update though, the sound card stopped the computer from booting at all except in safe mode. I may have to wipe the whole installation to get the drivers properly reinstalled. To make things worse it looks like there might be an IRQ issue as well (Unless PCI cards no longer have IRQ issues anymore? I don't remember.)
Technically they shouldn't have IRQ issues but even with modern ACPI systems some music studio techicians aren't happy allowing them to share IRQ's. This shouldn't affect MIDI though, what is it shariing with? When I get home I'll try and see if i can get the midi working on my X-fi with that game.
