PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Recommended softsynth to use for BIAB?

I'm still pretty new to BIAB, started using this year in August with the 2019 Windows version. With that said, however, I've been able to get a pretty decent setup by mining the forums here for tips. As others are hinting at there is no one-stop or one-size-fits-all solution for getting good MIDI sounds working in BIAB. I'll share the highlights of what I have found to be useful so far:

Cakewalk TTS-1 64 bit VSTi Plugin (free as of 8/2019)
Link to one forum posting:
https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=5116166&#Post511616

It's got a lot great sounds including a lot of controls, and I use it quite a bit for electric guitar, electric piano, and some of the more tricky instruments like Harmonicas and some of the wind instruments.

DSK Instruments
https://www.dskmusic.com/

A very unusual and quite expansive collection of VSTi plugins. Some of the sounds are quite good, and you can get many of them for free, but donations are welcome. The only downside that I have seen is that some of them are 32 bit so require the J-Bridge plugin to work on BIAB 64 bit, and I have had a couple crashes when loading them. You have to give them a few seconds to load before you start clicking around.

This is another excellent thread:
https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=541333#Post541333

This one references two other components which I have used among others, and which I have had great experience with.

*Coolsoft SoundFont Player (already mentioned in post above this)
*Timbres of Heaven soundfonts from Don Allen

You can also find some of the patch maps that come with BIAB for Roland, and access them by using the option "Select Higher Bank Patch (from .pat file)" when selecting a Midi instrument, and then pointing to some of the PAT files included with BIAB. I believe there are others which are available and posted in this forum, with instructions on how to download them. There are some very cool sounds in these sets.

Overall I tend to use the Plogue Sforzando VST plugin for a lot of songs and just hashing out new song ideas, especially the pianos. You can download the latest Aria Engine and also the some additional free sounds such as some Light instruments from Garritan at the Plogue site.

I'm still at the very beginning stages of finding my way with BIAB and MIDI and figuring out what things I need from BIAB that will work for my goals, so I strongly recommend that you invest some time in really diving into the forums to see what topics are helpful for you. I had to make a conscious choice to limit what I was going to take on with BIAB because it is just so packed with features. When you start tacking on VSTi's and plugins and RealBand, and other products that can interface with it, you can feel like your pursuing a new career in music technology instead of creating and performing music.

Speaking to others who may be getting started, I can now say, with the help of the folks on this forum, the PG Music Staff, the massive library of tutorial videos from PG Music on YouTube and other sources, I've reached a point where I have some pretty decent sounds and I know which sources I want for most of the instruments and I'm able to get some of my ideas put into some decent sounding songs. I just tell myself that they will get better and more sophisticated as I slowly build up my skills and knowledge of the product and the technology. I think it's very easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of features in the product and it's power, and I think it's an amazing value for what it does, but I've found that you can do some pretty amazing things with just a few of the features and a few decent instruments. It only gets better from there.