Originally Posted By: stratos
Originally Posted By: etcjoe
No. You can set up multi's in Aria with common BIAB combinations (Acoustic Bass, E Piano, Guitar etc.) in the appropriate channel slots. Then when you load a song, you can choose the appropriate multi with the instruments you want. Does that make sense? I don't think you can make the Aria player a GM type VST that is controllable as you want. I am not an expert though, so somebody may know more than I about that.


Hi Joe
Thanks for the help.
I can understand what you mean ..


General MIDI (GM) is at the bottom of the sounds good spectrum and Coyote is very near the bottom IMHO. GM is a somewhat universal as each GM number is assigned to a specific sound, i.e 1=piano, 19=rock organ, etc. See here:

https://www.midi.org/specifications-old/item/gm-level-1-sound-set

I say somewhat universal as each GM sound set may have a different piano, or trumpet, or rock organ, etc.

A step up from Coyote are some soundfonts (SF2). If you need or want to keep in GM then check out some free soundfont players and soundfonts. Some soundfonts are free some are not. The Cakewalks TTS-1 is also a better sounding GM.

BUT the best MIDI sounds are not in GM mode. They included SFZ as well as Aria, and the more expensive sounds like Kontakt, SampleTank, East West Play, etc. Why? Because GM must contain 128 instruments and 7 drum kits, thus they are constrained by the total sample size (KBs). For instance I have one piano sound that is larger in sample size than an entire GM, but it sounds a whole lot better than the GM #1 piano.

So if you want better MIDI sounds you have to get a non GM sound set. But you will have to assign what sound you want for each MIDI channel. Depending on what sounds (presets) you have with Aria you may find that you have a number of trumpets for example. That is the beauty of non GM in that you can have multiple options for sounds from more that one sound source.

What you need to do is to assign say a piano to the BiaB MIDI track by selecting Aria, placing a piano in Aria, then matching the BiaB channel and the Aria channel. In non GM sounds nothing is preset, you have to set everything up but the resulting sound(s) is much better.

I do all of my setting up in my DAW and not BiaB but others here can help you with that.

Good luck and I hope this helps.

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