Vquestor, I am not certain whether Soundfaction's Alive is any better than say Vienna. I don't have as many crashes in Windows with it. In the end they get the job done but are of moderate overall quality. Keep in mind that soundfont technology is getting long in the tooth compared to say Halion, GigaStudio, etc. You can still get reasonable quality sound from soundfonts and should be good enough to run your styles with them. The 'big guys' don't use soundfonts.

The one thing I may still try (I keep talking about it) is Halion. I believe you can load a full GM Wavetable with it. If you can then you have a very good sampler to use with very good virtual acoustic instruments. This should get you top quality for both styles and melody/lead instruments.

I have just downloaded SynthFont v.980 and will give it a test run.

From past experience many of the soundfont sample players are not very good with Yamaha XG midi files or styles, e.g., rgc:audio sfz+. These samplers are setup for the GM format and store the drums in Bank 128 only. Yamaha styles call up the XG Drums from Bank 127 (16256). Now you would get all kinds of strange sounds playing. In addition the XG Drum Kits need to have the drum instruments rearranged to follow the note numbers for the GM standard.

So to make this work you would need to:

* Go into the style and change the drums in Channel 9 and 10 to Bank 128.

* Change the Drums to GM using something like OMB.

And now you are set to use sample players like Orion, VSampler, sfz+ and others.

If you don't make these changes you will get dogs howling, pianos playing, etc. where drums should be heard and hi-hats playing. This sounds terrible but if you are a young person with their whole life ahead of you these changes can easily be accommodated. I am to old bored and tired to do this. That is why I have modified the sYnerGi GS to suit my needs.


[This message has been edited by Frank L. Rosenthal (edited 09-27-2004).]