General MIDI synths are rarely glamorous, but there's no reason why they shouldn't sound as good as more professional alternatives — that, at least, is the thinking behind NI's Bandstand soft synth. I tend to think of Native Instruments as a company who push at the boundaries of software synthesis with products like Reaktor and Absynth, but Bandstand is more mainstream, if no less useful: it attempts to address the need for a sample-based General MIDI (Type 1) player capable of delivering optimal sound quality. The supplied sound library is some 2.5GB, which is rather more generous than the tens of megabytes normally offered by soundcards and GM player modules. Bandstand comes with a General MIDI 1-compatible instrument library comprising the 128 standard instruments plus nine genre-specific drum kits.
The actual developer of the free software is Media Freeware. Our antivirus scan shows that this download is malware free. The software is categorized as Multimedia Tools. The file size of the latest downloadable installation package is 1.3 MB. Free MIDI Player lets you play MIDI music files on your PC.
It may be used as a stand-alone GM player or as a plug-in within VST, Audio Units, RTAS, DXi, ASIO, Core Audio or Direct Sound hosts, and Mac OS 10.3 and above is supported along with Windows XP. Direct-from-disk streaming is built in to allow long samples to be used in systems with limited memory, though having said that, I think the recommended minimum of 512MB (768MB for PC) is somewhat on the frugal side for today's machines; anyone seriously interested in computer-based music production really should have at least 1GB of memory fitted, and ideally much more. The recommended minimum CPU spec is a 2GHz G5, Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, and the software loads from a DVD-ROM so a DVD drive is obviously a requirement. Once loaded, the software must be authorised on the NI web site before it can be used, and updates can be downloaded there too; even while I was working on the review, an update to version 1.1 was announced. Bandstand features a mixer with effects, including both synthetic and convolution-based reverbs, and there are also some sequencer-like editing features including timing quantise, scale quantise and even a choice of classical note tunings in addition to the more common equal-temperament scale. There's also a useful amount of editability, but not at the expense of complexity. Bandstand uses a mixture of simple menus and drag-and-drop techniques, and comprises just two main windows.
A Quick Edit bar makes tweaking sounds straightforward, allowing real-time transposition, scale tuning, quantisation and the addition of a degree of human randomisation to the playback timing, while making adjustments to the mix or switching instruments is very intuitive. An interesting aspect of Bandstand is that the core sample library has been sourced from a number of big names in the sample provider world, specifically Sonic Reality, Best Service, Big Fish, The Badroom, Soundwarrior, Sound Ideas, Modo Bierkamp and Peter Siedlaczek, whose orchestral library is held in high regard. NI are responsible for the synthetic sounds, though they also mastered the other samples to achieve a consistent sonic character across the Bandstand library.
Though it bears little visual resemblance, the playback system uses the Kontakt 2 engine and supports GM2, GS and XG MIDI Controller automation, and when used as a plug-in, all the mixer parameters can be automated using the host's own automation system. In addition to the reverbs already mentioned, there's also chorus, limiter and a three-band equaliser that can be applied to each of the parts. When you first open Bandstand, you see the Play View page (shown above), where the 16 cells at the top hold the instruments you decide to allocate to General MIDI's 16 parts. Drums always have to go into the cell for channel 10, as GM regulations dictate, but otherwise you can drag and drop from the browser sections below. Each instrument can be set to polyphonic or mono playback mode, and an Autoplay button plays an appropriate short motif on each selected sound for auditioning purposes.
The browser is split into two banks to avoid crowding the screen, but you only get a single 128-sound GM set — there are no XG or GS style variations. The Edit bar sits in the centre of the screen between the two sections, and two buttons on the right let you decide whether your edits apply to the selected cell or to all cells. In the Play window you can save or load presets and also import and play General MIDI files.
Individual instruments may be muted, soloed or evicted from their cells. If you've moved the library samples, you can also reset the path to the new location from here, and this page also allows you to set the disk streaming options. For the currently loaded preset (a preset comprises all 16 instruments and their settings), you can use a comprehensive MIDI filter to determine whether Bandstand should use or ignore program changes and mixer settings as well as various types of MIDI performance data, including pitch-bend, portamento and so on.
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