Originally Posted By: KLB


I tried this with several different MIDI Styles. A lot of the sounds going through the Roland are pretty good, especially the more pop oriented sounds, but the brass, saxes, fiddle, etc. are marginal at best. Some sounds are unidentifiable as the actual instruments. Maybe that's just the way those GM instruments always sound, and the Roland is doing appropriate conversion. I would have to compare them to another set of MIDI sounds to tell. The good news is I probably won't be using a lot of the less common sounds, but I do want the jazz, pop, and rock sounds to be decent. If I really needed to improve the MIDI sounds I guess I could try to mess with the pat file you mentioned, or look into a soft or hardware synth.


GM packs 128 sounds into one file. The largest GM file I have seen is 2.5 GB. I have one grand piano that is 5.8 GB. Naturally it sound a lot better then the GM grand piano. This is usually true will all individual patches. I say usually because some are better than others. The better the MIDI sound source, unfortunately the most costly, the better the sound, period.

If you are thinking about getting better MIDI sounds then get the free Kontakt Player. You can find a lot of great sounds for it, but carefully read the sound requirements as some are only for the full version of Kontakt.

Originally Posted By: KLB

But here's the million dollar question:
As far as BiaB is concerned why use MIDI at all? Why not just stick with Real Tracks and call it a day? That's what I've been doing since I got BiaB. Not because I knew anything about the technology, but the Real Tracks just sounded so much better on my system. Up till now I've been avoiding most styles the weren't indicated as "R". I only started looking into the MIDI sounds after I realized I might be able to use my Roland with the BiaB MIDI.

Thanks again.



MIDI is a lot more editable then RTs. For instance say you have a MIDI track grand piano but it doesn't fit in the mix. You can change it to an EP, vibes, or any other sound. You can also easily change notes, add vibrato, slurs via the pitch wheel, etc. In other words you can have it play when you want and what you want and that is something that RTs can't do. Note that I am not knocking RTs, I use them myself, I'm just showing you some of the differences between them and MIDI.

I hope this helps.

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64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware