Dear Forum Friends

Can anyone recommend a free VSTi synth or sampler I can use instead of Coyote or SamapleTank?

I'm looking for some help troubleshooting a problem with my midi setup. I've been using RealBand for years and have occasionally had some glitches but things really came to a grinding halt on my last song.

During playback or recording the location marker stopped and all functionality froze. The audio continued for a short while then became very choppy. This happened at the same points in the song on every playback. I noticed the CPU usage spike to 30% at these points. I verified this in the Windows Task Manager.

I restarted the RB and rebooted the computer several times but the same problem returned. I then reinstalled the BiaB s/w suite from the hard drive. No change.

Then I started dissecting the song peeling off all the plugins from all the tracks which helped a little but still had the choppy playback.

Finally, I started removing tracks. I discovered the problem was with the midi tracks. I then switch from Coyote Wave table to SampleTank 2.5 and the choppy playback was avoided.

So here's where I'm stuck. The free SampleTank that came with BiaB does not have the range of instruments I need to give up using Coyote. I get totally lost looking online for free VSTi synths and samplers.

Can anyone recommend a free VSTi synth or sampler I can use instead of Coyote or SamapleTank?

Thanks

DC SpaceDog