Originally Posted By: royj
BIAB is music creation software and it should not be necessary for licensed users to scrounge around to obtain a fair quality integrated GM sound. PG still markets and sells MIDI styles and should support the styles with a decent GM sound set.


This is not an illogical opinion it's just that PG is not a synthesizer company. They must "scrounge around" as you said to find something that's free. To give you an idea of how popular GM is they used to sell the Bandstand GM synth by Native Instruments for $100 I think it was but it was discontinued. They also used to sell the Edirol Hypercanvass which was a physical disc in a box and is basically the TTS-1 now, for 50 bucks or something and that was discontinued too. As far as I know now there is no really good quality software GM synth available anywhere.

There is a few hardware synths with good GM sounds and there was one that PG used to sell called the Ketron SD4. Very good sounds but it's a module that you physically connect to your computer and then you have to run individual speaker cables out to your monitoring system. And it cost $500. Ketron has a new one here:

https://www.thomannmusic.com/ketron_sd_1000.htm

$422 is a great price and if the sound quality is the same as the original unit it's really good. You should consider it if you can live with a physical desktop module. The sounds are way better than any of the softwares we're talking about.

IKMutimedia (SampleTank) is software and had or maybe still does have a GM soundset called Sonicsynth but it's not a standalone synth, it's a sound library you install into Sample Tank. You can get an old version of ST for free and then buy that GM soundset but even then you can't just plug it into Biab and you don't have to do anything. You still have to do some configuration for each song you want to use it with. This is why I only heard of a very few people using it.

GM is not popular other than with our little corner of the musical universe. We're not a large enough group to support a whole market so there is nothing else that I know of other than the TTS-1 and Sforzando for free midi sounds and PG does not own either of them. Since they're free they can include Sforzando for you to install with no royalties but obviously Bandlab won't let PG just include the TTS-1, they are willing to let users get it for free but they want you to sign up with them first for obvious reasons. You might decide to buy soimething from them.

Anyther possibility some here like is Steinberg's Halion SE. It has a decent sounding GM bank but you have to do the same thing required by Bandlab. You create an account with Steinberg, jump through a few hoops, get it authorized and then you can download and install it. And you'll be getting friendly emails from Steinberg forever touting all their other paid software. For me since I'm a big geek anyway and Steinberg is one of the biggest music production software companies around, I like seeing what they have but maybe you don't.

Good midi sounds has been a problem for PG for as long as I've been using Biab and I'm sure that's a big reason why the RT's were created. Now you have the ability to use Playable Real Tracks so you can make them do what you want. That doesn't help with the Biab midi styles though, you still need some kind of synth for those and I think PG is running out of options. I understand what you wrote saying you don't need the high end sounds, just a good midi sound set is good enough. The problem is there a big gap between the the freebies and the Ketron. The other software synths don't even offer GM other than that Sample Tank soundbank.

Unless PG wants to create a whole new division of the company and write one themselves the only choices for free are these. You may not understand that sampling physical instruments to create the samples to use in a synth is hugely expensive. The amount of free samples available are extremely limited. There's a big difference between an individual being allowed to download some free samples to put into the Sforzando free player for example and a commercial company asking to do it when they're going to be used to support their paid products.

Here's something that just occurred to me. Since the Playable Real Tracks are somehow tied into the Sforzando which is a midi synth and PG already has this huge library of RT's maybe the plan is over time to use those recordings to create their own GM midi patches and ultimately that will be the default synth for us to use? No idea if that's the plan but it sounds cool.

Bob

Last edited by jazzmammal; 12/27/21 12:48 PM.
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