MIDI / Audio

A bit late to the party, but if your aim is mostly to play an instrument live to some recorded Midi or found midi on the internet, another solution without the great sound of the proteus (as others say, I don't have it :) ) was installing sfz from rgcaudio (it's free, find it ) With this you can load soundfonts, sf2 files, and play your midi files. For example if you want to play your guitar and the midi-song contains bass, drums, a synth or strings, you can do this greatly :). You load a bass soundfont for your bass, a drum soundfont for your drums and so on. Each instrument "gets" a midi channel. The bass soundfont then, which includes samples of a - you guessed it ;-), e-bass or bass-synth, plays your midi file. --> this one is only interesting for you if you want to know what soundfonts are, and what they have to do with midi and audio... A "soundfont" is just a container with samples, and informations when which sample(s) are played, how loud and so on. "A1 Bass.wav" for example would be a bass - audio sample, and the soundfont would play this sample if your midi file has an A1 note :). Or, but I don't want to confuse you too much, some other notes around A1 would be played too, say C2 or something. The reason for this is simple - smaller soundfonts don't use a sample for each and every note, but play "around that note" as well. Say, our A1 sample would play from G1 to D2, which doesn't sound too shabby. Back to sfz... There is a great thread by DarkStar where he explains how to do this (meaning to set up not only one midi track, but use for example sfz or any other sampler "multitimbral", = playing bass, drums, synth, strings.... You can read that . It takes a bit of time to set things up right that way, but it is not too difficult, and you can save your "band" :D in a template in Reaper, to use it next time. I use things like that often with my sampler. Explained easily: you load sfz as a vst instrument in Reaper, and have your midi files (bass, strings.....) loaded in Reaper. After understanding DarkStar's thread, or after reading the great Reaper-manual, you know how to setup sfz or any sampler right for your task. And from that moment on things are very easy, you only need to replace, say, the strings with some other instrument, if you load another midi file :D ... and the advantage of all this is, that there are some quite not bad soundfonts available online, and most of them are - free. You can try sf2midi.com for example, or another list is from the maker of a free soundfont-editor, which you could find .