GPO, GM and samplers

Lately I have reviewed some MIDI/sequencer sampler software. I have fallen in love with Garritan Personal Orchestra when looking for DAW software. They just released a new version - GPO4 - as I already have mentioned.

GPO makes very good sounds for piano, cellos, violins and most of the other instruments they have in their orchestra. And most of the instruments works as expected without any problems at all.

There is to things that I really miss out, and it is:

1. Percussion  - mapped to General MIDI. Today all percussion instruments has to be remapped from general MIDI standards.
2. Guitars. I love the sound of a good guitar.

To solve this I found a very nice tool called ForteDXi. It is a sampler (DXi interface) that gives you all general MIDI instruments not found anywhere. It is loaded with 128 high-quality sampled instruments, and offer a sound quality far better than the standard Windows Midi Synthesizer.

New version of Garritan personal orchestra is released

World famous Garritan just released a new version of their fine personal orchestra.

There are many changes, most noticeably is that they have replaced their Kontakt player with ARIA. You can also purchase and download the suite online now.

I am exited to try it out soon! I tried out the previous version about a year ago.

Tracktion 3 MIDI is buggy

After using Traction 3 for almost a year (read my conclusion here) solely for mixing audio I started on a MIDI project. I tried out with Garritan Personal Orchestra (read more about options I have tried here).

Traction often crashes when I try to load MIDI files downloaded from the Internet. The files plays correctly with MIDI-OX and Windows Media player.

When Traction manages to read the MIDI file (it happens on one of ten tries) I can work on my MIDI project and try to map instruments to Garritan. This works almost well. Some times when I try to load instruments then Traction crashes again.

Basically I can not work with MIDI using Tracktion.

Looking into the forums for help just confirms that other people also has similar problems. The product has not been updated for over a year, and there seems to be nothing new from the Mackie web site.

For now I am looking into REAPER to see if it any good and can replace Tracktion...

MSN and error 8100030d when logging in

I received this error when logging in into MSN. Looking for this error message on the Internet gave me nothing to work on except for the fact that it seems network related.

So I started looking into what can block the messenger. I have three options:

• The PC it self. As this was a problem on more than one PC I did not believe that the problem was here.
• The local firewall.
• My ISP.

My router is a Fortigate box running a relatively new FortiOS 3.0 image. I went in to the protection profile for my outgoing traffic and found that the profile protects me from MSN traffic.

I am not sure why this happens but it was "solved" by deactivating the Messenger scan from within the Fortigate.

STOP F4 with Internet Explorer

If you experience blue screens when running Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 (and probably some other versions of Windows) read on.

1. Do this.
2. Then run ATF-Cleaner to clean up your temporary files.

Good luck.

Convert MIDI to MP3 online

On this page you can convert your favorite MIDI file to MP3/WAV/OGG online with almost no hassle.