You can try SoundStage from Sonivox (www.sonivoxmi.com). For the price, $100, it is a remarkably good GM module. I downloaded the free version and tested it out for a few days, and was generally pleased. My objective was to find something better than my 800MB soundfont collection, and it tempted me.

General MIDI never sounds perfect because it's a compromise of sorts. But if what you want to do is make your freshly-generated BiaB or RealBand tracks sound a bit better, this would do the trick. Because I am a song writer making demos, my goal is to get "close enough" to a good sound, then I will usually substitute selected instruments from a sampler (SampleTank, Kontakt, Kore, etc.).

SoundStage is about 1 gig, which is 4x the size of Sonivox's GM Soundfont set (250 MB), so I don't believe they just repackaged that particular beastie into a new wrapper.

Having said all that.... when I step back and think about what makes me the most productive in producing demos, it's RealTracks. For my money, I will almost certainly allocate any funds toward more RealTracks, rather than more samplers of any type.

Scott Emery