Hi Jon, since you're newly retired and been away from music for some time, I'll try to catch you up.

The Sound Canvas VSC is over 30 years old and Roland stopped supporting it years ago which is why there is no 64 bit version. PG has absolutely nolthing to do with it, it's unfair to complain to them about it. Same for the new Roland VST on the Roland Cloud site. Completely owned by Roland, how it's paid for and used is all up to them, not PG.

There are tons of good VST's available but the problem is none of them are free. They're owned by somebody and if PG were to include them they would have to pay some kind of royalty which means they would have to charge you. They're doing the best they can by linking to the old TTS-1 which is still free and is also about 30 years old and then they were able to include Sforzando which is a different kind of midi synth. It uses soundfonts and some are free and some you pay for. There is a user here who posted a soundfont that works ok, if you're interested someone will link it for you.

Here's the thing though about midi. We don't know what you expect or how picky you are. Some people here are fine with the TTS-1 and that's great. For me as a gigging musician for 50 years, it sounds pretty fake and weak to me which is not surprising since it's also very old technology. It will get you by for a quick test to hear if a midi style is what you want but nowhere near good enough for any kind of serious production even to just play for friends. A $150 Casio keyboard you can pick up at Best Buy for a grandchild sounds better than that. Of course that's my opinion, YMMV.

If you really want and need high quality synth sounds then people pay big money for big name instrument VST's. Kontakt, Steinberg, Garritan are just a few. You can start at $300-$500 but it can easily go to thousands. That's what you're looking at if you really want true high quality midi sounds.

Since PG starting producing the Real Tracks/Drums few users even care about midi any more but some do which is why Biab supports it. The poor sound quality of freebie GM softsynths is the reason the RT's were invented in the first place for the large majority of users. The total number of RT's is in the thousands now in every style of music you can think of. Since you've not used Biab for years maybe you're not familiar with the RT's? If so, you may find you don't care about midi any more.

What you may not realize yet is with Biab 2022 PG has created playable Real Tracks That's probably the single best thing they've done since the RT's were invented 12 years ago. The big complaint against the RT's is you cannot make them play a specific riff or bass line or guitar lick to fit a certain song you're trying to put together because they're audio files, not midi. You can now alter what an RT plays by using either the Piano Roll window or Editible Notation. PG just posted new vids showing how it works. Not all RT's can do this yet but they've started with 50 and more will be created going forward.

Catching up with digital audio music production after being away for years can be a challenge but now that you're retired what better time to learn something new? Yes, Biab is way more complex now but so is getting players together, rehearshing them then paying for studio time. Go for it and have some fun!

You mentioned you can't post pictures. You have to use the full Reply window you get by clicking on Reply, not by simply typing in the box at the end of the thread. In that Reply window is File Manager. Click on that and you can Browse to wherever you stored a screenshot. You can do multiple pics at once, when you're done hit Attach. If you hold down the Windows Key and then hit PrintScreen it automatically puts it into a Screenshot folder under Pictures in your Windows Directory. The only gotcha in using the File Manager is the pics don't show up in the Preview, you can only see them after you Submit it.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.