No MIDI Playback? (GM) Please Help!

Ugh... So I'm auditioning for a spot as composer on a game production team, and I was preparing to make up and send them some MIDI compositions to demonstrate my mad skills... But I learned to my dismay that I don't get any MIDI (GM Bank) feedback in Windows Media Player or any of my sequencing programs! I looked into Playback devices (in the control panel) and was appalled to see not even the generic Wavetable Synth for MIDI playback. It's not like I never had it; my computer played MIDI fine before. But now only FireFox plays MIDI files (using a Quicktime extension)! Is there a way to retrieve the drivers/BIOS of the generic WaveTable synth again?

Please help! I'm in a hurry!

And no, it isn't just muted. It's not there at all!

~Tamias

Running a Toshiba Satellite with Windows Vista 64bit.

Thanks!

Newsbreak!

I ran System File Checker and now Microsoft MIDI Mapper is back, or at least available in my sequencers. But I still don't get sound and the Mapper doesn't show up in the sound devices menu.

** My technical knowledge of Vista is pretty piss poor, only briefly fiddling with other people's machines and I've never touched SP1, so don't take what I say as gospel, but I have in the past looked into MIDI on Vista, as a friend was having serious issues **

Having said that, from my limited experience, Vista doesn't allow you to direct the software MIDI mapper to external devices (Including your sound card)
don't ask me why, cause I honestly don't know

if you're doing anything "MIDI" in vista, you have to do it entirely in software, as you've seen with the firefox plugin.
as long as you keep it solely in software, you should be ok

I have heard that there are workarounds (hex editing system files) to enable the MIDI mapper to be directed to hardware devices, but I really would not recommend that

What you need to do is find a software MIDI sequencer / player
find some sound fonts you like
play the MIDI file through the MIDI player loaded up with the sound fonts and export the results to WAV

from there, you can encode to MP3 or whatever

this is the only way I know how to do it

incidentally, after getting frustrated with Vista (my mate's an amateur producer who needs 2-way MIDI communication between his machine and his keyboard and hardware sampler - lack of external MIDI was a complete show-stopper for him) I showed him Ubuntu Studio

Initially he was sceptical (typical windows boy through and though :D) he's now moved over full time to Linux for his music production

Just food for thought

I see. So instead of making life easy for people, Microsoft pushes them toward Linux. Ugh (nothing against Linux).

Thanks a bunch!

~tamias