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MIDI as an interface is "really good" in OS X. I dunno where this came from, but it's never been the case. In general the built-in MIDI on Macs is really good, I expect they've invested a lot in making it good since lots of musicians use Macs. There are definitely some exceptionally nice instruments in there, some of which I've even ported over for my own personal use in Reason, but it's not relevant to standard MIDI playback (which IMO is best suited to the simple and familiar sounds that most MIDIs are being composed with in the first place). Last I checked you could get MainStage, a program intended to assist with live performances, for $15 on the app store, and it includes the entire GarageBand instrument/sample/loop library and all of the expansion packs that were ever released for it. To expand on what Fraggle said about high-quality instrument sets, though, Apple has bundled a ton of their old products and newer acquisitions into their music production software and is selling it for pennies on the dollar compared to what any competitor can afford to do. I've not found one that really does the job satisfactorily. It would be really nice if someone would make a simple and functional freeware midi player that could take up the task since QuickTime dropped support for it. (And reverb.) As of the past couple of OS versions, though, I don't know of any simple and functional way to just play a damn midi file without opening it in my Win7 VM, which is disappointing. It used a simple and familiar-sounding Roland SoundCanvas-based instrument set, similarly to Windows' built-in midi playback, though with some annoying oddities and idiosyncrasies.
#MIDITRAIL SOUNDFONT MAC OS#
MIDI playback on Mac OS was historically QuickTime-based, I believe.