Unless you want to slice and dice audio and then pitch shift the audio (which can introduce artifacts) - doable, but a lot of work - then MIDI is needed if you want to play specific notes of specific duration.

As Mario said, there are a number of free options available to you (not the least of which is a bunch of free SFZ libraries that you can play using the Sforzando Player that comes with BIAB). In addition to the free ones, there are moderately priced to expensive libraries that come pretty close to sounding like the original acoustic instruments. It will never be perfect, but unless you've got a talented trumpet player or flute player or symphony orchestra available to you on a whim, you can come pretty darn close with high quality libraries and a little bit of tweaking of the MIDI sound. Many of the high quality libraries have full articulations available, so you can do (for example for brass instruments) slurs, doinks, shakes, falls, etc. Guitars can do hammer on and hammer off, as well as fret noise and string bends, etc. You won't get that with just entering the notes and selecting the MIDI library, but many of those things can be done with the use of keyswitches (you just have to add the key switch notes to the MIDI stream to trigger them), and mod wheel usage.

Getting good MIDI still takes some work, but slicing and dicing existing audio is a lot more, in my opinion.

John

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