A lot of the early midi (and, I suppose later midi) styles were written when the available playback equipment (whether hardware or software) had only one, or at most two or three velocity layers. The VSC, which was the BAIB staple for years, has, I think, one. Often older midi files often sound better, and arguably more real, on the VSC than on much better equipment. When I try playing BAIB piano parts through Sonar's bundled piano VST, they often sound lumpy as the piano has 127 virtual velocity layers and the part was compiled to be played through a VSTi with 1! I usually use Sonar's midi compressor to even out the peaks and troughs in velocities and restrict the number of velocity layers in the sample sets I use. BAIB string parts often sound fairly awful in good quality sample sets I assume for the same reason. These things are easily sorted though and are really just part of the workflow. Until I got a 64bit Windows 7 PC I always loaded VSC in any Sonar project and routed any midi parts through that first to get a better sense of what they sounded like before then running them through bigger, better sample sets, and making any amendments to the midi velocities. Sadly now, VSC won't even intall on my PC ... Isn't progress great.

Brian