Yeah, like rharv alluded to, it isn't so much a hardware vs. software problem, it's more of a realism of the samples/player engine issue, which is, for the most part, tied to the release date. The nature of the beast is, more recent samplers/samples tend to sound better.

There are soft solutions out there that sound great, and work well with BiaB.

A couple of my favorites are VI.ONE, and more recently, Garritan Jazz and Big Band 3.

VI.ONE is a good solid "all around" sampled instrument set that runs in a Kontakt player, and Garritan JABB3 is just what it says it's for: jazz and big band. Note that Garritan switched to using their own Aria player (VST, RTAS, Standalone) some time ago. I find their Aria player to be both efficient and user friendly, much more so than the NI Kontakt player.

However, the first caveat here is, neither of these soft samplers are meant to be General Midi plug-and-play like the Coyote Forte.

That said, if you're comfortable with setting up a few instruments in a virtual rack, followed by assigning MIDI channels to each instrument, then VI.ONE or JABB3 could very well work for you. It's actually quite easy to do this, and the newly configure multi-instrument sets are easily saved and recalled.

The second caveat is that BiaB only supports one "rack" of instruments at a time. You can't run, say, VI.ONE and JABB3 at the same time unless you load your BiaB song in RealBand.


On a related note, I'm in the process of converting my "live" instrument rack to use Garritan's JABB3. I do an eclectic show that features everything from Sinatra to Sabbath, and I'll be keeping VI.ONE/Reason/Steven Slate/EZDrummer in my virtual rig for many genres. However, in A/B testing, the jazz standards material just "sounds better" when using the Garritan player/instruments.

Hopefully this post will help more than confuse. ???