Well, on a hunch, I just put a digital audio file in the xu4/mid directory and pointed the xu4/conf/music.xml to it. and you want to use that Roland Sound Canvas to play those MIDIs while playing Ultima IV via xu4? So, what to do if you have a Roland Sound Canvas (or other preferred MIDI device) and some authentic-sounding MIDIs. And, if you put MIDI files themselves in the xu4/mid directory, and edit the xu4/conf/music.xml file appropriately, it will play back the MIDI files, but with its own internal MIDI player (via “TIMIDITY” perhaps?). Unfortunately, there’s no way to send MIDI output via xu4 to an external MIDI playback device (which DosBOX allows). Some googling showed that some had requested the ability to use their own MIDI files and/or MIDI devices with no response for the xu4 developers. So, my goal was to make xu4 work with Telavar’s MIDI arrangements. Personally, I’ve always been partial towards Telavar’s Ultima music which seems to almost perfectly preserve the original tempo/timings while leveraging the superior sample/instrument quality of Roland Sound Canvas MIDI devices. While they do sound quite nice, in my opinion, they don’t sound quite authentic. The most recent update to xu4 did away with MIDI (except for one song that remains MIDI) and instead now plays back music via “tracker-encoded” *.IT files. But I had something I was excited about sharing prior to fixing it back up (after our last theme became obsolete).

Please pardon the austere appearance of this site.

Roland sound canvas midi player