clusteruk excuse me, I also mentioned a "Hardware" Midi player, see video attachment!
Small correction as you did not actually do so. You might perhaps think you did (and i understand the confusion).
All current solutions uses a soundfont/softsynth solution. There is nothing hardware about it other then software attempting to emulate certain hardware. And you are correct in that we can argue that this is what (certain) midi (capable) hardware is doing as well (when strictly speaking about playing MIDI on/to f.e. a soundmodule) but it is not the same.
It is crystal clear from clusteruk's request that he wants to be able to use real midi hardware such as sequencers, soundmodules, keyboards, guitars, pedals etc. and use that in combination with midi sequencer software such as bars'n'pipes. Either by letting those mentioned devices input (raw) MIDI data /into/ the software or by using the software to /send/ MIDI data to such devices.
As such that requires real actual MIDI communication between hardware devices and software. And that is what user clusteruk is referring to. MIDI is a communication protocol similar to how serial and parallel ports communicate.
