| Band in A Box: better (free) sounds 1 | | Afdrukken | |
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Welcome to this Band In A Box Tutorial. This first BIAB (Band In A Box) tutorial will teach you how to upgrade the sound playback quality of BIAB. It is very likely you are not very satisfied with the sound BIAB generates. This is normal and not BIAB's fault since Band In A Box does not genarate any sound itself at all. Yes, you read well, BIAB is NOT responsible for the actual sound you are hearing. How's that? BIAB (and any midi file) only tells a synthesizer what to play (notes) and by what instrument (preset or patch on that synthesizer). If you have a standard soundcard and if you did not hook this card up to a good synth or module, BIAB will propably use the Windows GS wavetable software synthesizer as playback synth, and that's not good (I am being very gentle here). The good news: you can get better sound quality for free since BIAB can host VSTI (VST instruments, a software synthesizer standard) since version 2006. Good VSTI can be found for free on the net. For this tutorial we will use a free vst soundfont (a soundbank standard based on sampled instruments developed by creative) player called SFZ. You can download it here. The soundfontplayer SFZ itself does not contain any samples or sounds. We will load a GM (general midi: standard where synthesizer patches (presets) are ordered in a fixed way thus making exchanging midi files possible. One is shure a piano part will be played by a piano sound, a bass by a bass sound etc...) soundfont into sfz. You can download one of the best free GM soundfonts (fluid 3) here. I realise I offer a direct download link here, and I dont know if I am entitled to. The link comes from a very good soundfont resource called Hammersound. I suggest you pay a visit to this site, recommended. I will also email the webmaster of hammersound to ask permission. Update: I found another very good (but large) free GM soundfont called SGM-180. Especially the acoustic piano is VERY nice. Fretless bass is also very good and the drums are more balanced and natural then in most soundfonts. Upright bass is a little weaker than in fluid3, but overall the soundfont is more balanced. You can get it here, Click on the navigation link (on the left) "soundfonts" and once on the soundfont page click on the download link on the right of the yellow SF2midi.com banner. You can listen here to an mp3 from a wave file rendered by BIAB using the SFZ soundfont VSTI with the SGM-180 soundfont loaded. The file is encoded with lame to 128kbps stereo. The chords used are the ones from the song "Cantaloop Island" by Herbie Hancock.I also edited some bossa style to obtain a "simpler" style that does not use hi- hats to give a more "acid jazz" feel. Instruments used are: Standard drum set Fretless Bass guitar Electric "Rhodes" piano These soundfonts are zipped. All winXP machines can handle zipped files. But: the files are further "zipped" with another compression tool: sfArk. This makes the soundfonts very small for download. To decompress (unpack / unzip) sfaAk files you wil need sfArk. Download sfArk here. So Download AND INSTALL / UNZIP all tools software and files and there we go... 1. First thing to do is launch Band In A Box. 2. Go To: Opt. (options)-> midi driver setup:  3. Select "Use Dxi Synth":
 4. The rack where you can choose a synth or plugin will pop up, here you will choose "add plugin" if SFZ is not listed yet :  5. This window will invite you to choose a dll file. Browse your harddisk to locate sfz.dll (typically program files/Vstplugins if you didn't change anything during the install of SFZ):  6. Underneath the synthrack there should be SFZ now:  7. click in the "file" area of SFZ (to the right of File >) :  8. Browse to where you decompressed and saved the fluid soundfont and select it (+open):  9. Now the fluid soundbank should be loaded into sfz (loading time can be hight since this soundbank is quite huge):  10. As a last action you will have to tell BIAB to send the correct midi messages to SFZ making SFZ playing back the right sounds. For this to happen, you select Auto send midi messages on startup in BIAB:  11. Even with these steps it is possible that you will hear a piano play back the drum part. To correct this, click on the DXI icon on the right in BIAB. This will open the synth rack again. Select channel 10 in SFZ:  Afterwoods you have to change the bank number to 128. Then you will see SFZ switch to the standard drumset for drums.  So that's all folks and I hope this has been of some help to you. Hugo It's also a very good idea to join the BIAB discussion group at Yahoo groups. Free additional styles and songs are available over there: Yahoo BIAB user group Discuss this article in the Forums Related: Band In a Box Review             |