Screwtape at
How did we get into a place where my Linux machine can't play music in the standard, well-documented, freely-licensed MIDI format, but music formats whose only documentation comes from reverse-engineered Amiga assembly code works just fine out-of-the-box?
Olivier Mehani likes this.
midi can work on Linux if you install a midi compatible machine or a machine emulator. there are some in Debian main.
to clarify: midi files state what notes to play and when to play them, etc., but how the note sounds is undefined, which is where a diverse range of equipment and emulators come in.
You want Timidity++, and then some fiddling.