This is driving me nuts. I'm a longtime Mac audio person, but have never done much with MIDI. Now out of curiosity, I've downloaded "free" MIDI files from many online sources to check out the MIDI functions of my Cubase. Without exception, all files give me a display such as "QuickTime cannot open the file: "filename.mid" --it is not a file that QuickTime understands (-2048)". Some apps say "kBadHeaderSignature".

These files play fine from their sites (such as http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/9349/recursion.html) through Safari/Quicktime, but when downloaded (yes, via "save as source"), no go. I have a friend who took these files into some ancient conversion app (he insists on staying with OS9), and they come out fine! They play everywhere and import into Cubase. I can't find any app in OSX which seems able to do what he has done. But why should any such thing be necessary??

The strangest thing is that I hear no one else with this complaint, anywhere. What could be wrong? I see no info anywhere online--it simply seems that these things should play, period. I'm running OSX 10.4.2. Could it be doing something evil?

I'll save everyone the bother of calling me an idiot. Or maybe someone will learn something. I just found out that downloading such files must be done via control-clicking the link on such web pages to "download linked file"--NOT saving through the Quicktime plugin "save as source". The damned files look the same. Live and learn...

I'm trying very hard to move off my Windows machine and onto a Mac, but problems like this continue to confound. I moved a few hundred Karaoke midi files to my Mac, loaded Qmidi, and now I'm getting the kBadHeaderSignature error message when I attempt to open most of them. This is the only thread I've found on the web that speaks to this issue.....another bummer about being a Mac user. Anyone with any advice, or should I just relegate my Mac out of the family room A/V setup (the reason I bought it in the first place)?

I've just tried the save as in quicktime and it plays just fine… Notable difference, I'm in 10.4.6 and Quicktime 7.0.4.

As the error message talks about a header, I'd look into the file (with a text editor like BBEdit and check the beginning of the "garbage" you can see.

This is almost definitely a file-type problem. Macintosh historically has used special fields called file-type and creator to distinguish file types and not the extension that is prevalent with PC's. When a file is converted from a PC to a Mac the file type and creator are not filled in automatically. Some programs rely on the file-type to determine if the file is compatible or not. For MIDI, the file type needs to be set to 'midi'. Several utilites are available to allow changing the file type. Google it up.