Jenny:

If you are saving MUDCAT files from the DT (they say click here to play), yes, they are all MIDI files. Hold shift down when you click to save them to disk.

If you can play them using your web browser, you ought to be able to play the saved files by double-clicking on them. If nothing happens when you click on them, the simplest thing to do is open the saved files using your web browser. In Netscape use file, open-page, choose-file, files-of-type "all files", (then find your saved midi file and open it). In MSIE, use file, open, browse, files-of-type "all files", (then find the file again).

Other non-critical info: My MIDI files have a little icon beside them that containing two purple musical notes. The icon indicates that the computer recognizes them as a registered file type, in this case a MIDI file.

There are LOTs of types of sound files you can get over the web. WAV files (soundwave files), MP3 files (compressed WAV files), RA files (Real Audio compressed sound files), and MIDI are the most common. MIDI is the smallest -- on MUDCAT it's just a record of what notes to play. Often, it will may also contain note intensity information and instrument choice information. MIDI is not like a recording which will always sound the same -- MIDI will sound different according to how your soundcard decides to reproduce the notes and instruments it is told to play.

I don't think it's real player 5 that's letting you play the music. It's probably just the new software that installed properly for your computer. Real Player is mostly for listening to compressed radio/audio files as they are downloaded. MIDI is a very much more compressed format -- your midi setup decides how to play midi files. My old computer used to play MUDCAT MIDI's with some strange instrument that had a dramatic shift in timber when it went to the higher frenquencies. I never got around to figuring out how to change the default instrument sound. My new computer makes Mudcat's MIDI files sound just like a piano. I struggled for a few hours to get a neighbor's soundcard (a no-name card) to work for her with no luck. Plug and play stuff seems either to work perfectly, or to be very difficult to get running.