This MIDI player was able to, way back in the days of Windows 3.1 I believe, produce a sound that was much more realistic. With some well done MIDIs, it came very close to sounding like a real band, if I remember correctly. It also allowed you to change the instruments being used to play a particular track on-the-fly. However, I don't think it was able to save these changes to the MIDI you were playing. It could however, save the sound it was producing as a WAV file.

The only thing I remember about the player's name is that it starts with a "U". And I'm not even 100% certain of that. I believe it was ShareWare.

Is there any master of Google out there gracious enough to take on my request?

I believe the class of software you're looking for is what was called in those days a "TRACKER", and it wasn't precisely Midi, it was all done with samples. The files it produced weren't midi files, they were like .S3M or some other format.

Now I'm blanking on the names of these programs and on the name of the file format. Someone else will fill in here, I'm sure...

The file format you're thinking of is MOD

If it was way back in Windows 3.1 era, try using DOS as a search term, along with MIDI or tracker.

Yeah! MOD!

Yeah, the product you're talking about is a MOD/S3M tracker.

MOD4WIN was an excellent one, it was made freeware at the last update. This page has some info and a download:

http://pjeantaud.free.fr/mod4win/english.html

Gareth

There's Ultra Tracker; that might be what you're thinking of. I used Scream Tracker, Impulse Tracker, and Fast Tracker for most of my stuff back then. I believe you can still find them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker

Here's a MOD archive to get you started, I remember regularly downloading these at college and taking them home to listen to in the evening:

http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/mods/index.html

Gareth

Like other people have said, you're probably thinking of a MOD Tracker. That said, there might have been some actual MIDI player that used actual samples for reproduction instead of those horrible typical synthesized instruments that you usually hear.

You might want to read through this page and see if any of the names are familiar. There is a "Unison", but that looks too recent and not what you describe.

Ah. Well, DeadFire, if you're not talking about Mod Trackers, then, these days almost all of the multitrack recording programs do what you want to do with their Virtual Instruments features. No need to go back to Windows 3.1 for that.

Well, there's a difference between wavetable synthesis and sequenced sample playback (despite the fact that the latter is often referred to as the former), which is more along the lines of what I'm suggesting. There might be a sort of meeting point of MIDI and MOD where the player reads a MIDI file, but uses modulated sample playback like you find in MOD trackers instead of synthesis. Even better, it might have separate samples for different note ranges.

Still, you're right in that FM synthesis was the standard back then, and either method above is likely to be a lot better. That said, whenever I encounter one of those web sites where they think it'd be really cool to embed a MIDI file, I still hear FM synthesis.

Could he be referring to MIDI using digitally sampled patch sets? In the early 90's, my Gravis Ultrasound had onboard 30pin ram to load huge, high quality MIDI patch sets.

It hurts that I can't remember these details because back in that day, I was an ace with MIDI and MOD (and s3m, far, ult, xm, mtm, and all that). Maybe the Ultrasound used its 16 digital digital channels in combination with its Roland MPU401 and..... oh, I don't remember.

You could likely capture the sound card output as a WAV using some other software. If you have a Sound Blaster Audigy, it's built into the driver, giving you the "What U Hear" slider on the Windows Sound Controls recording side. Combine that "capture whatever the soundcard outputs" with an MP3 recorder like Messer, and you're set.

Regardless, if my motherboard still had ISA slots, I'd still be using that Gravis Ultrasound PnP with its whopping 4 meg of 30pin SIMMs. Come on, man, it 4 times more digital channels than the SB16, and it had MPU401 and AdLib emulation!