PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows MIDI stopped working -- what have I done this time?

I discovered something that makes the DSK voices very easy to access within Sforzando. I dunno, maybe I missed a help file where this was outlined, in which case I guess I'll just say "Never mind." But in case I haven't read on.

First of all, I loaded Sforzando into Sonar, mostly because of the song I'm currently working on. I don't think it really matters which platform it's running from within.

Regarding the voice files, here's what I did initially:

After you make your purchase, you're provided a .pdf with links to fourteen archives, all of which are in .zip format. So first thing was to unzip everything, of course. You wind up with fourteen folders that contain your instrument files. I copied all of these folders into a single folder that I labeled "Sound Files" for lack of a better term. Inside each of these folders is a bunch of individual .sfz files and one "Samples" folder that contains sample wave files. Some of these folders will contain additional subfolders.

So when I first started playing around with the sound files, I tried loading a single file at a time from within one of the folders. This worked fine, but man would it take forever if I was browsing through a bunch of 'em. So I clicked on the Settings tab in Sforzando and saw "User files path:" with a "SET" button next to it. Hrm, I thought. SO I clicked on that, and tried loading one of the folders into this area. And, yep, it took it just fine. When I went up to the "Instrument" bar on top, now there appeared a "User" category at the bottom. So I clicked on it, and there were all the sound files for that folder.

So I gave it a go, and Sonar/Sforzando were playing the files perfectly.

Well, cool, I thought. But it was only one folder. So, hrm . . . I thought again. What about the whole "Sound Files" folder, which contains all of the DSK folders? So that's what I did -- I just listed only the Sound Files folder in the "User files path"

Well, it looked real impressive. When I clicked on "User" the whole shebang of Music file folders was on display and when I clicked on a folder, all of its instruments were revealed. So, I went to give it a try with any instrument -- well, I had one in particular that I'd been looking for for a while now -- a nice example of French Horn. So I navigated over to the General MIDI folder -- "GM Instruments" it's called, and it has four sub-folders, one of which is "GM Instruments" (the other three are "GM Drums," "GM extra fx," and "GM extra instruments"). So I select GM Instruments, which reveals a looong list of instruments. I cursored down and found French Horn, selected it . . .

And up pops an error message telling me it can't find the files! WTF? So, is that the way it is with everything? I wondered. I checked another GM Instrument. Same thing. Checked another, same thing. Then I decided to start at the top of the list and go down through all 50 or more instruments. At the top was "Accordion." Tried it out, it loaded fine. Next was "Acoustic Bass." Tried it out, it was fine too. Next was "Acoustic Grand Piano." Nope, didn't like that one. Then "Agogo." Nope, didn't like that one either. I paged through the next twenty-five or thirty patches and didn't get another single one that would load. I skipped to the last couple of patches. Nope, they wouldn't load either.

I took a closer look at the error popup and it claims it's looking for patches in the samples subdirectory (???) with weird filenames like "pno021v123lew@.wav" -- .wav files when they're supposed to be .sfz? Something's messed up. Really messed up.

So, with a bit of growing trepidation and wondering if I'd wasted twenty-five bucks, I started with the first directory of sounds: Bass. I tried several at random. They all worked fine. Then I went to the next folder. Classic Grand Piano. All those worked okay too. I tried several more, and none of them gave me the same error popups that I was getting with GM Instruments. Well, that was something of a relief. Except! The main reason why I bought this bundle was because I wanted access to better GM sounds than I already had! Grrrr! Fortunately the other selections are full enough where they cover most GM sounds, and then some. But not all.

So I can state, with some reservations, that I have figured out how to have all the sounds easily displayed -- and accessed -- within Sforzando. But I've also found a rather glaring error in the way it's trying to access GM Instruments -- at least within Sforzando. Can't say about other synths.

I'm curious -- if you're using this set of instruments, have you run across this same problem, specifically with GM Instruments? If not, and if you're using something other than Sforzando, I'm wondering why this is happening with Sfortzando but not other synths.

At any rate, I think I'll be sending a note off to the author of this instrument collection, see what insights he might be able to provide.

Oh, and at least I found a good french horn. Found it in the Orchestral section. The selection of guitars is crappy, though. So what else is new . . .