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As far as I can tell, this is completely impossible. On 10.8.4. I am trying to play a sample MIDI file off of Wikipedia.

Quicktime v 10.2 fails to open a MIDI file with error message

The movie “Ii-V-I_turnaround_in_C_four-part_harmony.mid” can’t be opened because the file is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.

VLC is also unhappy:

No suitable decoder module VLC does not support the audio or video format "MIDI". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.

AFAICT I need to go find some random obscure MIDI player and download it for Mac, which seems extremely strange given that a site as large as Wikipedia uses them freely and assumes they "just work" on Mac. What am I missing?

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  • You need to install the Quicktime 7. Yes! you have to have 2 Quicktime apps (the v10 and the 7) on your Mac. I had a full blown answer for you but some schmucks in here keep voting it down without reason.
    – Ruskes
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 11:36
  • @Buscar웃 can I see the full blown answer anyway?
    – djechlin
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 16:31
  • OK, here it comes :)
    – Ruskes
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 16:46
  • You can download Quicktime Player 7.6.6 for Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks from here: support.apple.com/kb/ht3678
    – Colin
    Commented Mar 28, 2014 at 9:20

3 Answers 3

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QuickTime Player 7 also supports mid files.

Many DAWs like Logic support importing and exporting mid files, but one free MIDI sequencer or editor is Aria Maestosa. Synthesia is an application or rhythm game for practicing playing mid files.

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In addition to Quicktime Version 7.6.4 (518.35), I am able to play midi files with the free RealPlayer for Mac OS X, Version 12.0.0 (1725), on my 21.5-inch, Late 2013, 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 iMac, running OS X 10.9.5 (13F34). This older version should also work on PowerPC Macs.

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It's worth pointing out that QuickTime Player 7 will not work on the forthcoming MacOS Catalina 10.15, because it's 32-bit. When that OS is released, there will not be a native way of playing MIDI files.

There is an app in the Mac App Store called MIDIPlayer X which works well. It costs a tiny bit of money, so you'll need to weight up whether the functionality is worth it for you.

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