Are you talking about DOSBox or VDMSound or what?

I'm running XP and I was trying DOSBox 0.63 but you tell me... am I barking up the wrong tree?

I'm trying to get a DOS MIDI program to "talk" to the Win32 MIDI device as if it was a legacy MPU-401 device. Under DOSBox, it sends MIDI out ok but doesn't receive any MIDI in.

MIDI IN is afaik not implemented

(moved topic to DOSBox forum)

As Gulikoza says, MIDI input is not implemented in DOSBox. Qbix's (perfectly valid) philosophy is that any feature not needed to get an actual game working is lower priority than everything else.

Someone could write an unofficial patch that addresses this, but so far I don't know that anyone has.

I don't know if it should be a lower priority :

A lot of old synthesizer programs could still be used IF DOSbox would support MIDI In. I just tried one, it works perfectly, except that it can't communicate with the synth because there's no MIDI In support.

Seem to be in an odd situation here, because the core developers see DosBox's purpose as running games, but of course it's very useful for running many applications too, and an increasing number of people seem to be using it for just that.

Maybe somebody should start a project called 'Dosbox Productivity Edition' 🤣

I've looked at recording before and for starters, SDL doesn't handle recording(stupid omission IMO). There's a patch or use another API.