I’m afraid I will have to disagree with Vquestor and (to a lesser extent) Uncle Dave. While Roland VSS is pretty good, it is by no means the best-sounding PC GM-compatible soft synth, nor is it by any means the most capable, nor the least expensive.

The absolute least expensive way to get awesome sound from a PC in a way that is compatible with GM1 and Level 1 GS as well as Level 1 XG and VL is with a PC sound card based on Yamaha’s YMF-724 chipset (for a bit more money you can get its big brothers, the YMF-744 or 754, which add four-speaker four-channel surround-type sound, but otherwise have pretty much the same features). Mine (an XWave SC-724 — at work I have an AOpen AW-724 that cost the same price but had inferior amplification and other analog circuitry and an inferior software bundle) cost me $15. For that I got a quite decent PCI sound card suitable for full duplex audio applications, gaming (it supports Sensaura 3D sound, which in turn is compatible with EAX 1.0 and 2.0 and with A3D 1.0 as well as DirectSound 3D), CD-quality recording (surprisingly low noise level for a card of this price range), etc., but by far the best feature is the on-board XG+VL MIDI synth with 64-voice wavetable polyphony, 3 effects engines (Reverb, Chorus, and Variation/Insertion, each with anywhere from eight to several dozen preset effects, each with parametric control in real time!), 676 total wavetable sounds (480 Level 1 XG plus an additional set for Level 1 GS compatibility — and that’s not even counting the 21 drum kits [11 XG])! plus Sondius physical modelling which adds an additional note of polyphony (and what a note! — unlike wavetable sounds, Sondius VL instruments can vary in tonality, in real-time, exactly the way real brass, wind, bowed or plucked string, and other solo instruments would in response to such real-world variables as Breath Pressure, Embouchure (lips) shape, Throat Formant, Tonguing, Growl, Scream, Absorption, Damping, etc. In other words, for $15 I get roughly the equivalent of the basic powers of two MU-50 Level 1 XG wavetable tone generators plus a VL-70m Physical Modelling tone generator! All for under twenty bucks!

Wanna hear what it can do? If you have Windows Media Player 6.4 or later, listen to this (5 minutes 39 seconds of music, a shade under 4MB)! That is a direct and unmodified (except for linear gain normalization and the use of a codec for more efficient use of Internet bandwidth) recording of the output of my card playing a MIDI demo file I downloaded from NTonyX and modified to make better use of my card’s specific features. When you hear it, you probably won’t believe it’s really MIDI, so here’s the proof (in the form of the actual .MID file, the same 5 and two-thirds minutes of music, but weighing in at only 86kB) — but this won’t sound anywhere near that good unless your MIDI hardware or software has Level 1 XG and VL capability. In other words, Roland’s VSS won’t do it justice, and neither will the onboard MIDI synth of, say, a SoundBlaster Live. But Yamaha’s S-YXG100plus 1.0 installed on a genuine Intel Celeron, Pentium II, or better will (unfortunately the VL module won’t install on any AMD or Cyrix CPU, even though it would likely work just fine once installed on a decent Athlon)! You can download a free time-limited demo of that from Yamah’s XG site.

[This message has been edited by COMALite J (edited 09-25-2001).]

That’s strange. Even if your Windows Media Player lacked the codecs (assuming it’s Version 6.4 or later — the only reason it wouldn’t be is if you have an old Windows 95 and have never used Windows Update to upgrade the Windows Media Player for free — Windows 98 came with 6.4, Windows 98SE with 7.0, and I do believe Windows Me comes with 7.1), it should automatically download them the first time you try to play something over the Internet that requires them (only 6.4 or later will do this).

On XG vs. GS — since every Yamaha Level 1 or better XG device also includes Level 1 (equivalent to the original Sound Canvas or SC-55) GS (though they can’t legally call it that — in the ads and docs they call it “TG300B Emulation Mode” , you don’t have to choose. Yamaha’s soft synth will play all three (GM1, GS1, and XG1), while Roland’s will only play GM1 and GS1, not XG at any level.

XG is superior on a technical level, too. It is much more flexible in terms of effects, of what can be done with the sounds, and also in terms of backwards compatibility with GM. GS made some mistakes in this regard, and the designers of XG had the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and being able to learn from Roland’s mistakes. And, unlike GS (which only claimed to be an open standard: Roland never actually allowed anyone else to use the GS trademark, which is why Yamaha has to use that “TG300B” euphemism — in fact, this is the whole reason there is even any such thing as XG! Yamaha was very happy to use GS, flaws and all, in their own TG300B tone generator, but Roland reneged on their promise to let Yamaha or anyone else use the GS name and logo on any sufficiently compatible device), XG is truly an open standard. Yamaha has licensed the XG name and trademark to other manufacturers, including Korg and Ensoniq (the latter for use in PC sound cards using Ensoniq Mæstro II chips instead of Yamaha YMF chips [though these lack VL]) and I believe others as well.