Alternatives to Roland Sound Canvas?

[rdq]

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Hello

Looking for a VSTi that does general MIDI . Free or commercial. Any suggestions welcomed.

Keyboard sounds (piano/organ/harps/etc) of particular interest.

Anything that'll play SF/SFZ also of interest.

For context, was sadly disappointed by Sforzando (https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando.html (https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando.html)) which simply refused to load any material.

TTIA.

R.

[kovacs]

Why not the Sound Canvas plugin?

https://www.roland.com/global/products/sound_canvas_va/

[UltimateOutsider]

A few years ago I wrote a multi-part tutorial on playing General MIDI files on Ableton Live. In the first part I did a quick run-down of all available plugins that were either fully or partially capable of GM. Also, I know that General MIDI support alone does not equal a whole Sound Canvas (later models had multiple instrument variations and percussion sets), but these are still the closest tools I know.

Gonna try copy/pasting the section on fully-capable plugins (note that Sonic Cat purity just released a 64-bit version a couple years ago; not reflected in my post):

Full GM support (GM sound set, multi-timbral, respond to program change events):

• HALion 5 and HALion Sonic 2 (by Steinberg) are the only fully GM-compatible plugins I know of that have both 32-bit and 64-bit support on both Mac and PC.
• Purity (by Sonic Cat) is a nice-sounding multi-timbral synth with full GM capabilities. It is much less expensive than the Steinberg products, but it is also 32-bit only on both Mac and PC.
• Sound Canvas VA (Roland) - Roland released this instrument about a year after I first wrote this post. It is almost the perfect GM plugin. It's got 32-bit/64-bit support, and works on Mac or Windows. It has the entire sound libraries of Roland's various Sound Canvas synthesizers, and is 16-part multitimbral. My only complaint is that although it's multitimbral, it lacks multi-out support. In other words, if you want to process each MIDI part as a separate audio channel in your DAW you have to use multiple Sound Canvas VA instances (one per track) instead of using just a single instance and routing separate MIDI tracks to it. But you can't beat this plugin's sound sets. The Sound Canvas line was the benchmark for General MIDI sound. I'm not going to write instructions for this one like I did for HALion and Purity, but in practice it's more like using the Purity plugin, so you can probably refer to those instructions to figure out how to get Sound Canvas VA working right inside of Live.

[BertKoor]

Old thread on General Midi soundfonts: viewtopic.php?t=263513
A random top-10 of SF players I found: https://hiphopmakers.com/best-free-soun ... vst-plugin

For context, was sadly disappointed by Sforzando which simply refused to load any material.

That's interesting.. What material specificly won't load? Got an error message?

[rdq]

Thanks all. The SCVA is magnificent. Spent most of the weekend playing (with) it. Brilliant. Would recommand most highly. What is not immediateely obvious is that this contains a wealth of DSP effects on top of everything else. The Dimension-D stuff, for example, is amazing. Let us hope Roland's authorization servers do not go offline any time soon.

re Sforzando. No recollection of anything meaningful. Now de-installed which I think is a shame.

[kovacs]

I have the SCVA on my iPad. But I prefer to use my hardware section for production stuff:

[UtopiaAudio]

Neatly ordered stack, sorted by instrument type

[Niklashe]

The Korg Triton VST has general MIDI banks.