Yea I see many posts all over the net. Sounds like this problem started with Lion (which I don't use, I'm staying with SL for a number of different reasons, this only adds to the list.

The work around most people mention is to use the AU version of the player. Under the covers I would think that its the same engine being used in either case, however I think this comes down to two different ways the player is being used programmatically. One way, the old way, references a quicktime player as a "midi device". This is undoubtedly what BIAB is using now also. A lot of software is. And apparently this API does not expose or document how to do certain things, like set the volume level for example. I'm willing to bet this API also does not provide a way to "stream" the soundfonts or to select alternative SF2 banks.

The other way to use the component is by using the DLSMusicDevice AU plugin which is provided by Apple and seems to use the same underlying engine, except through the AU interface. That means that software wishing to use it will have to force their software to deal with AU hosting instead of using a simple midi interface, which is undoubtedly quite a bit more involved. That is how we access it when using the DLSMusicDevice from within a DAW or GarageBand.

So this is sad news all the way around. First it means that in Lion the quicktime DLS player pretty much sucks. A lot of people are complaining all over the place and many software creators are upset about it too. I have heard different theories about what is causing it, but nobody really knows and the simple midi interface API does not expose all the controls necessary to override this built in behavior. Maybe someone can find some hidden pref file somewhere to configure it, but it seems like a lot of people already tried to sleuth this out and didn't find a solution.

but the other sad news is that as far as BIAB is concerned its not going to be possible, I don't think, to configure streaming or use other soundfont banks within BIAB unless they wrote a considerable amount of code to handle AU hosting to host the DLSMusicDevice instead of using the simple API that is used now.

I hope that makes sense.

Well anyway for me here its still possible to load in a better DLS file by replacing gs_instruments.dls, it just takes a while to start up BIAB. And its still possible to host DLSMusicDevice in another AU host or DAW of some kind. Fortunately for me I'm not on Lion or ML so I don't have the volume problem mentioned. I really don't know what to say about that...it sounds like Apple really screwed up a lot of people with that design change and hasn't shown any interest to correct it.

Are BIAB users on Lion and Mountain Lion having this problem with midi playback through DLS?