Does anyone know if there is a free/cheap MIDI player/synthesizer library that I can incorporate into my iPhone application?
As I understand it the iPhone doesn't have native support for MIDI playback.
To work around this limitation I've created a bank of .caf sound samples that I playback myself but I'd really like to improve the implementation and use MIDI if possible.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Look at TiMidity++; it looks like something that should be portable to the iPhone platform.
TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats. TiMidity++ is a free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.
Many people have ported TiMidity++ into various platforms; FreeBSD, NetBSD, many Linux distributions, Windows (and/or Cygwin environment), and Mac OS are known to have their own versions.