Converting MIDI

Because one of my hobbies is composing music, I use MIDI files a lot. What's MIDI, you ask?
MIDI is one of those things that is fairly easy to use, but very hard to describe. Putting it as simply as I can, it is a system that lets computers and other electronic devices pass musical information to each other. The MIDI file is not actually music itself, although if you double-click on it you will hear music in your music player. What it does is control "event messages" such as the pitch of musical notes to play, and parameters such as volume and tempo. It draws on your computer's sound card for the different instument sounds, so the quality you get will depend on the quality of the sound card. Among the benefits are that a MIDI file can be created or opened by a wide variety of programs, and can then be manipulated in a myriad number of ways; the files are incredible small (often, less than 5kb). The downside is that they can only be listened to on a device that has a soundcard or similar, so not on your CD player, for instance. However, they can be converted to a music format such as mp3 or wav so they can play on a CD player (with the downside of course that the files are very much larger, and nowhere as malleable).
Just about every song you can think of is available for free somewhere on the internet in MIDI format. Suppose I need to provide some backing tracks for a singer. I download a MIDI file, open it in my music program Noteworthy Composer, strip out the melody line and voila, an accompaniment.
But I then need to put it on a CD for others to listen to. My problem has been finding a cheap conversion program - you don't want to know how I was doing it before! However, I was delighted yesterday to stumble across a music player, Media Jukebox, which not only plays just about every music format you can throw at it, but also will convert MIDI to mp3 or wave. Now we're cooking!
Actually, I will tell you how I did it before, because you can use the same method to record just about anything audio on your computer. First, download and open Audacity. Click the record button, and start playing whatever you want to record (it might be an old-fashioned LP that you want to transfer to a CD). At the finish, click the Stop button, then trim any unwanted bits at the top and tail, and export in your preferred format.