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.

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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. 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.

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