On 26 Jan 2016, at 1:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/25/2016 12:06 PM, Nick Raspa wrote: >> Many have mentioned Garage Band which is a good basic program, but there is >> also another (free) program called Audacity. Although I generally use >> Garage Band for recording, I usually finish it up in Audacity. You can also >> record directly into Audacity just as you can with Garage Band and Audacity >> is available for both Mac and PC. >> > > Audacity is an audio recording program -- it doesn't have any midi sound > built into it. > > The original question was about a piece of software that would be free > that would produce sounds when the student hooked the midi keyboard up > to the computer. The keyboard is simply a controller with no built-in > sounds at all.
Already recommended is the combination of sforzando (https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando/) and Ivy Audio's Piano-in-162 patch in sfz format (http://ivyaudio.com/Piano-in-162). sforzando is a vst/au plugin, which needs a host to run it. It will run in Finale, or in DAW programs. For mac, anyway, the smallest free application I could find is "Hosting AU." That works fine as a tiny "stand alone" application to act as the host for audio units. I tried downloading sforzando, piano-in-162, and hosting au. This combination does a good job of turning a midi keyboard controller into a pretty decent piano. piano-in-162 has two choices, one with ambience, one without (you get both). It is quite a good sound font, especially because when the sustain pedal is depressed it changes the tone to have a full open-string resonance (a subtlety that is missing from many otherwise-pretty-good stand-alone electronic pianos). The download of piano-in-162 will take a while, and, unless you pay for it, it will have to come through a bit-torrent program. It is all clearly explained on their download page. For windows computers, you'll need to find a small vst hosting stand-alone application. David Froom _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
