I wouldn't say it's rotten to the core, and there has been a lot of technology over the years to make it better (and you can get pretty close with high end solutions). And I boiled it down to its simplest, but you get the point.

And remember, MIDI isn't just there to play piano. It's designed to provide a reasonable representation of any instrument out there; however, it pretty much uses the same rubric for all of them, when in fact every instrument is different.

Interestingly, from the listener point of view, the most vocal critics seem to be from folks who criticize the sounds of their own instruments.

But if you are looking to get a good performance from notation, then unless you are using a MIDI rendering engine that provides humanization capability (and that may not be the way "you would have done it"), you are going to get every note on the exact division you wrote it.

Here's a good test. Play a song on the piano (even using a metronome to keep yourself in time), and then look at the result. You will find very few of your notes land on the beat divisions. They might be off by 1/64th, 1/32nd, maybe even 1/16th. If you look at the result in notation view, it looks like someone just splattered black paint dots across the page.

I don't know if there is a free trial version (you should check), but you might want to try Native Instrument's Kontakt Instrument called Alicia's Keys. It's $99 to buy and works with the free Kontakt player, but you don't get all the bells and whistles then like you do with the full Kontakt player.

You might also want to take a look at True Pianos.

But again, the "performance" of the MIDI has to be right for it to sound right and that's the hard work part of it. No short cuts.

John

Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 2x2TB, 1x4TB SSD
Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 2x1.5TB, 2x2TB, 1x4TB SATA

BB2024/UMC404HD/Casios/Cakewalk/Reaper/Studio One/MixBus/Notion/Finale/Dorico/Noteworthy/NI/Halion/IK

http://www.sus4chord.com