Play Midi Files on Ports

Hi there,
The problem has existed even before the MidiMapper was pulled for W8, whereby the use midiOutOpen for a given range of ports - e.g. coolsoft's, renders the mcisendstring functionality as useless. Mcisendstring makes its own calls on midioutopen, and if open, invariably returns a MCIERR_SEQ_PORT_INUSE.
After looking through this tutorial, the epiphany has come that a month of Sundays and then some will pass before we can ever produce code to play midi files "natively" in VB6- if it has ever been done at all.
It would be great news to know if there are any libraries or wrappers available for this purpose.
Any ideas & suggestions welcome.
Thanks for reading!