I have an advantage: Allegro includes it's own MIDI driver (was added because Linux' sound drivers have native MIDI support only if the sound card supports it). The advantage is that this driver needs sound samples to work, so it's similar to the MOD you're talking about, so it sounds the same in all computers, you can configure Allegro in a way that it overrides the system's MIDI driver even if it has "native" MIDI support. Also you can define your own "sound palette" just modifying the samples to use.
That's one thing I love.
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