If i recall correctly, UAKM was one of the games where having an AWE32 soundcard over the standard SB16 gave improved music quality due to AWE32's vastly superior MIDI synthesizer.
However, in UAKM (and possibly the other, I haven't gotten around to installing them yet), I cannot choose AWE32 (won't detect anything but regular SB16 in the options).
I really want the AWE32 music here. Is that possible?

You got to understand that the game is running under a emulated DOS environment (DosBox that is). It doesn't really matter what sound card you have installed because DOSBox will emulate the sound card you select in the game through the Windows Sound System.
But you may choose a different card in the game and see if it changes enough to fulfill your quality desires.

that's the setting for the midi & not sound card

MPU 401 works great for the MIDI part.