Perhaps because midiconfig is setting which device on the host machine is to be used and is not the same from machine to machine? Also the devices any given PC can change order over time. Installing the Munt driver will add yet one more. Having nothing specified makes DOSBox use the systems default MIDI device. There is no way to predict what midiconfig=0 would point to on any random machine.

Even if by chance it would select the desired device, it might not be right for a game's current configuration, i.e. if a game is configured to use Roland sound, but the wrong device is selected it will sound like shit. What you are probably missing is to run a game's setup to select the emulated audio hardware you want.

collector wrote:

Perhaps because midiconfig is setting which device on the host machine is to be used and is not the same from machine to machine? Also the devices any given PC can change order over time. Installing the Munt driver will add yet one more. Having nothing specified makes DOSBox use the systems default MIDI device. There is no way to predict what midiconfig=0 would point to on any random machine.

How many people who download DOSbox to play games have multiple MIDI devices installed on their machines? My guess is very few. Anyone who had this configuration would surely know to edit the .conf file appropriately.

It just makes me sad to see so many people using soundblaster because they don't know any better, when the vastly improved experience of MIDI is right there. However, asking most people who download DOSbox to play games to edit the dosbox.conf file seems impractical. DOSbox runs well right out of the box, which is a great accomplishment. It almost never needs any tweaking. MIDI on by default would be another great feature.

Are you sure your default midi device is correctly selected ?
As far as I know (and how dosbox is intended to work)

1midiconfig=0 => use first device
2midiconfig=  => use default device.

Qbix wrote:

Are you sure your default midi device is correctly selected ? As far as I know (and how dosbox is intended to work) […]
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Are you sure your default midi device is correctly selected ?
As far as I know (and how dosbox is intended to work)

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1midiconfig=0 => use first device
2midiconfig=  => use default device.

Wha...it is enabled by default? OK well then that makes my job a lot easier! I could have sworn I couldn't get it to work without tinkering, but here it is. I suppose I got it off that one guy's MIDI instructional videos that got taken down. Anyway, this is great news and I'm off to tell everyone I know to change from soundblaster to MIDI! 😊

Which only means people have to select midi in the game's setup...

I'm pretty sure that the default MIDI device in Vista / 7 / 8 / 10 is Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth. No change in the DOSBox config file is needed.

But as Dominos mentioned, you need to configure to game to use General MIDI for music. This usually is done through running SETUP, INSTALL, SETSOUND or something similar. It's slightly different per game, but not hard to figure out.

Setting MIDI CONFIG is needed when you want to have DOSBox use a Soft Synth, such as BASSMIDI, VirtualMIDISynth or Munt.

Mixer /listmidi brings up a list of midi devices with the MIDI ID numbers.

I do think you are right on a fresh install, but I have seen the order change over time in Vista and Win7, probably from installing/uninstalling devices.

collector wrote:

I do think you are right on a fresh install, but I have seen the order change over time in Vista and Win7, probably from installing/uninstalling devices.

Yes that can happen. VirtualMIDISynth for example "takes over" as the default device.