Playing MIDI files on the Mac with Garage Band 10.0.2

GarageBand 10 is vastly different than GB6! Within Mac OS X 10.9.2 I double click a file ending in “.mid”, in Finder, and GarageBand volunteers to perform it. But not without some help. The upside is that you can choose different voices for the separate parts. Now you should see several green bars stretching across the right of a large window. I will call them staves here. Each staff is one of the parts of the music, reminiscent of several staves of a musical score. There is a right pointing triangle which causes the music to play but perhaps with inappropriate voices.

The small upper-most left-most square leads to a greater selection of voices. If you select a staff then you are presented at the left with a multi level hierarchy of voices. There are some nice ones.

One of my MIDI files acquired an “extended attribute” I know not how. This spooked Garage band which quarantined it by adding yet another attribute. The shell command:
xattr -p com.apple.quarantine 4-Sarabande.mid: demonstrated the problem and the following two commands fixed the problem:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine 4-Sarabande.mid
xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork 4-Sarabande.mid

2017 July It seems that Garage Band 11 has forgotten how to play Midi: QuickTime 10.6.3 which comes free here play midi but too softly.