: You know, I hate to admit it but I am coming to the same conclusion. The
: MoviePlayer that comes with QT 2.0 and 2.1 does not convert but the one
: with QT 2.5 does. I didn't think 3rd party apps would be hampered by the
: fact the Apple didn't code this into the earlier versions of QT. They
: could just use QT Musical Instruments to decode the MIDI file.
Again, need the SDK to know. If Apple didn't include a way to access the decoded data, which they've done recently in iOS, then there's no way to convert them. Once QT 2.5 came along it must have offered a way to do this, so it was trivial to decode them to another movie, and save them in another format.
: Which brings me to another point. The Marathon Music MIDIs we have are not
: actually in General MIDI format they have been converted into QuickTime
: format. The ones from Alex Seropian are QT and so are the ones you get if
: you use Marathon Music Exploder. I am wondering if there is a way to
: extract the MIDIs from the Marathon Music file in General MIDI format?
You're misusing the term General MIDI, which refers to a set of instruments, not a file format. If you mean, can we convert the .movs into .mids, yes. Apparently you can get them from the story page:
http://www.pfhorums.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=2430&view=findpost&p=30741
: Having extracted these is it also possible to program today's MIDI software
: with the same instrument set as the one in QT 2.0 Musical Instruments.
: This should give you (in theory) the same sound only on modern equipment.
You would need some way to convert the QT 2 Musical Instruments into a format modern equipment can understand. This goes back to my comment about not wanting to reverse engineer said file. It's a bunch of snd and INST resources if you want to goof around with it in ResEdit (unlike QT 2.5, which uses something like ssai and ssac resources--which is why they're not interchangeable)