FAEbGBD, I have not used Garritan's J&BB to any great extent because of the volume & mod wheel issue. I am working with people at Brainspawn to come up with a way to send the mod wheel message from within forte Ensemble my host software. As Jos and others have pointed out I could buy an external Mod Wheel (to replace my A-37 Joy stick) or send Mod Wheel CC# messages via OMB or a Sequencer to set the volume levels.

I find this a pain for live performances in a one man band setting. It is a great setup for live performances where you are playing only one instrument at a time or in a studio setting. There is no doubt that the quality of J&BB is very good especially with all the features built into each instrument. Garritan accomplishes this with a relatively small byte size instruments. He has a number of demos at his web site for you to check out. In the case of GPO I was able to mangle the *.nki files and get rid of the mod wheel stuff but no such luck with J&BB. This too shall be fixed with time....I am not to worried I have got other alternatives, e.g., Colossus, NI's instruments, etc.

I will say it again, I find the quality of the Bandstand instruments very good for auto accompaniment (or midi files) but not good enough for standalone or lead type instruments. It is ideal in my software based arranger system. At the same time (and for free) you can do almost as good with a soundfont player and wavetable (enhanced wavetables).

[This message has been edited by Frank L. Rosenthal (edited 12-14-2005).]