MIDI - SBLive! vs SBAudigy

[SteveC]

Hi all,

I currently have an SBLive! soundcard, and am about to dive into MIDI editing/composing/etc as my girlfriend and I have just bought ourselves a Yamaha Digital Piano. Is the SBLive good as far as quality MIDI is concerned, or should I go for an Audigy (been offered a good deal), or should I go with something completely different?

Any input useful!

[rubank]

Congrats to the piano, hope you´ll enjoy it (I have a couple myself).
If you want good instrument sounds you´ll need 3rd party SoundFonts. These can be used on either card, even IIRC the Audigy can handle bigger sounds (to the limit of your system RAM).
The soundsets delivered doesn´t sound very good (to me), I´ve tried the Audigy with the 8Mb set and it really didn´t impress me.

If you don´t want to spend a lot of money on separate sound modules (Yamaha and Roland have good ones) I suggest you try Gigasampler software synth, which costs less and can give you the vey best sound quality, as it uses your HD to store the sounds and therefor can use huge soundsets. With todays computers latency is no problem. (A really good piano typically takes more than 1 Gb). Good soundsets cost some though.

Just some thoughts

rubank

[Pace]

The SBLive can use half your system RAM to store soundfonts. I suppose it depends on how good your ears are if you can detect anything better. Like Matrox vs NVIDIA for your eyes I suppose.

What version of the SBLive do you have? I have the original full version (similar to Platinum, but all additional connectors are on a backplate daughterboard), and this has all I need. I've never actually managed to get into sound editing, but I'd say an SBLive will be an excellent starting point.

If you want to get fancy, go get a pro card, with 24bit/96KHz in the future. Use what you've got now

Though if you can offer me a good deal on the Live, I'd wholeheartily recommend an upgrade

P.

[Dogbert]

What about the Yamaha XG software ? It sure sounds better than an SB Live for normal midi files.

[SteveC]

1Gb for a Piano's samples? Then how come the Piano itself only has like 16Mb of ROM or something for its own samples, yet sounds to me, fantastic?

Pace - I only have the normal SB Live '1024' - I never got the LiveDrive thing with all the connectors on.

I guess I'll sort out some good speakers though before I think about getting better sound fonts. Are there any good free soundfont banks anyone knows of?

[rubank]

Originally posted by SteveC
1Gb for a Piano's samples? Then how come the Piano itself only has like 16Mb of ROM or something for its own samples, yet sounds to me, fantastic?....

Because they have to make shortcuts for obvious reasons. This doesn´t mean it can´t sound alright.
But "the real deal" have 4-6 samplings for each key at full sounding length, i.e. no loops, plus samplings of sympathetic resonance and whatnot.

The "pro" cards higher sampling rates doesn´t do anything for the midi sounds really, but they might have better output charachteristics - I doubt you´ll hear any difference though.

rubank

[RichL]

Originally posted by SteveC
I guess I'll sort out some good speakers though before I think about getting better sound fonts. Are there any good free soundfont banks anyone knows of?

I use two soundfonts on my SB Live! to get it to sound anything like as good as my old AWE32.

1st is the 'Ultimate Soundfont', about 18mb, and 2nd is the 'Joe Clean' guitar only sound to replace instrument 27, and is about 4mb IIRC

I originally got them from
Live! Center but I think the site may be down/broken.
If it is, I can always mail them to you. You have a 512kb Cable dont you?

[SteveC]

Hey RichL - I'd love the ultimate one!

edit - scratch that - their site's working fine!