Simple General MIDI plugin for Ableton

[drumworldtv]

I see a lot of posts from people who are frustrated because their general midi files won't just play on Ableton without a ton of setup and tweaking. For those of us who have a large volume of general midi files that we rely on but who are switching over to Ableton it would be really really nice to have a simple plugin for Ableton that would allow simple drag and drop of these GM files. I must admit that I am confused as to why this would not be an obvious feature to offer.

[AustinThumper]

Dunno - it is tremendously satisfying to load a big .mid and assign voices to 24 or so tracks... And have it sound good in the end. A huge pain, yes. But worth it -- the end result can be very unique to the engineers' (the guy making the voicing decisions - us) style. Like arranging a piece, but much easier.

A m4l patch to manage and map gm midi files into Live (load, parse, assign channels, devices, racks and presets, yada yada) would make most of the pain, and some of the gain, go away.

tl;dr
Make it easy and Live becomes a fancy gm player...

Caveat : Seeing as I'm a lazy bastardo, I'd use this a lot, for my own amusement.

Cheers!

[doghouse]

http://hammersound.net has SoundFont collections for GM. You can load these into Sampler.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-genera ... dfont-v3-0 has links to another GM SoundFont set.

[mrdelurk]

The point of having a General MIDI plugin like Bandstand (if it only worked in Live) is that unlike the pedestrian method of manual timbre assignments, one can route 16 tracks of a .mid file into a single Live track with Bandstand on, and all sequence tracks snap to the right General MIDI sound, there is no "Was 'Track 6' meant to be piano or laser zap?" head scratching. It's not an alternative but a precursor to calling up the fancy sounds.

I tried Bandstand on Windows 7 and Live 8. Live complained something at first and said that it will run the Bandstand plugin in "Compatibility Mode". All that day, the plugin worked great. Next day, trying to open any of the 50+ Live Sets I created with Bandstand crashed Live. Starting with a totally empty Live Set, and dropping Bandstand on an empty track also produced a crash.

If I just launched the Bandstand Application by itself, no problem, it worked. Live's manual says exactly zilch about compatibility mode. So I uninstalled Bandstand, which ended Live's crashes right away. After replacing the missing Bandstand plugin with Cakewalk SFZ+ (and redoing all the 16 track routings in a Live Set), loading any General MIDI soundfont, even just a measly 8MB one produced a "not enough memory" SFZ+ error. So I threw away SFZ+ too. Dragged Ableton Sampler into its place. Dragged a 144MB General MIDI Soundfont into Sampler. "Importing... A serious program error has occurred. Live will shut down after this message box is closed." So I threw Sampler away too. (Just joking.)

I started anew, and tried to replace the missing Bandstand with Kontakt. In Kontakt's file window I navigated to my Soundfonts folder. Once I got to the root level where the .sf files are, hello "Live has stopped working" error. 2 times. All in all, no Live plugin seems to handle General MIDI too well, apparently. PG Music in their Band-In-A-Box uses Forte DXi which works well, but it's DirectX, not a VST.