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NI seem to have got confused when producing Bandstand's sample library

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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

Tucked away behind an innocent-looking cappuccino bar in Schlesische Street on the west side of the Berlin wall, a crack team of computer music scientists have been trying to fill a black hole in our universe.

However, this particular black hole isn't comprised of Dark Matter - it represents the curious lack of high quality General MIDI software on the market at present.

For many musicians, General MIDI (or GM, as it's more commonly known) has fallen into disuse. Its original concept was well-intentioned: divide the 128 MIDI Program Change messages into 16 specific categories of eight presets each so that MIDI files could be played back properly through any GM sound module.

Unfortunately, the rise of GM led to the production of some rather bland-sounding MIDI modules. As a result, many serious musicians turned their back on it, and it's been relegated to the creation of automated background music and mobile phone ringtones.

For those who've kept the faith, however, GM technology can offer great rewards. Yamaha and Roland extended the system with their XG and GS standards, which offer more presets and many editing and layering options.

These systems often have insert effects and parametric EQ, thus creating an advanced music production environment, even when used with the most humble of MIDI sequencers.

Overview

NI's Bandstand is a software GM module. You get 16 parts (assigned by default to MIDI channels 1-16) and - unlike most hardware GM modules - an attractive yet simple display of your instrument assignments. At the touch of a button, this becomes a full-window mixer.

Unfortunately, when we started to test Bandstand, it wasn't long before we hit problems. For one, none of the mixer controls has a numeric display.

Native Instruments say that this is to keep things simple, but in GM file programming it's vital to be able to see the numerical values so that they can be copied back into the sequence as Control Change messages.

Similarly, there's no display to show which MIDI program numbers correspond to which preset.

Elsewhere, the user interface seems bugged when you switch between Basic and Real reverb modes. The Time control starts moving erratically when you use the mouse to change the reverb type, and it sometimes stops working altogether in Real mode.

Although the reverb is of good quality, its default setting also seems far too dry compared to other GM modules.

Another problem is that the Modulation controller does arbitrary things depending on the instrument. On some instruments, it adds vibrato (as expected), but on others, the results can be very weird.

Sometimes, it sweeps the filter down to nothing - and the filter also exhibits unpleasant zipper noise during sweeps. Weirder still, if the Harp is selected, the modulation wheel affects the release time of all things!

The next gripe is that the MIDI file player doesn't always cancel the sustain pedal when you stop playback (a known bug), so you're left with notes hanging on indefinitely.