Quote:

Danny if all you're doing is playing professionally made SMF you don't need any of the PG programs. This is a free one and is quite good in my opinion.

http://www.vanbasco.com/

Well I do far more than simply play professionally made SMF's however as mentioned in my first post, as it specifically relates to live SMF playback and my solo act I edit them beforehand with Cakewalk 6.0.

You know...remove needless parts, channel-ize, convert from 0 to type 1 as needed, apply many types of normalization so that all my backing tracks have consistency, edit controller 7, remove mistakes, humanize, the usual stuff to make them sound professional (well more so any-who).

I used to build all my backing tracks from scratch in real time, but that was a long time ago, and with the plethora of easily available SMF's on the Internet it's not worth it for me any more. Now all I have to do is find the ones I like and edit them to taste.

As to the vanBasco MIDI file player it's very basic and does not have anywhere near the live functionality of ShowPlay or for that matter MIDI Maestro.

I would be very happy to be wrong on this but I keep my eyes and ears pretty open and have yet to see any dedicated live SMF players that can even approach either ShowPlay or MIDI Maestro!

Interestingly before the advent of SMF playback software and suitable laptops I used a Roland MC500 II (and before that a Yamaha QX1).

The Roland MC500 II can still do many things that most software based SMF players cannot touch (less the lyrics thing). In fact the Roland MC500 II can do a lot of what ShowPlay can do including loop points and foot-switch control! Alas it's 3.5" floppy based and its display sux and it's useless for lyrics.

The QX1 uses 5 1/4" floppies with a drive that constantly spun to improve random access and because the RAM was too low to load an entire song at once.

The price of progress I suppose.