I've been reading through the forums and there's lot's of good info to be absorbed. I've seen mentioned a few times that if Kompakt is used you can use the gigastudio samples instead of loading the soundfonts into a soundblaster card. It is also made to sound like there is an advantage to doing so. My question is what does the gigastudio version offer that the soundfont version doesn't? Just so you know, I'm using Finale2003 on a pc with windows xp with an audigy sound card. I've got tons of questions but I'm gleening what i can from the posts and I'm leting the learning curve sink in as I go. Look forward to a response.

The best advantage to using the Gigastudio version is that each instrument file contains ALL the sounds possible within that instrument. Since this covers quite a bit of ground, certain sounds have to be changed by doing controller changes with the modulation wheel. For example, on the tenor instrument, when the mod wheel is down, you'll hear regular hits. When the mod wheel is up, you hear puffy hits. Soundfonts aren't capable of this flexibility and would therefore require you to load in a separate, alternate tenor instrument (there are four tenor instruments in the soundfont version to accommodate this). So all the sounds are there, but they're not nearly as accessible as with the Giga version. Also, the giga version is in stereo, whereas soundfonts are mono to account for the fact that soundblaster cards aren't typically capable of performing well with such large (220mb+) soundfont banks.

AB

Wow!!
You guy's are great. I posted my question last night at midnight (Eastern standard) and I'm reading the response at 10am. Thats good service. So, if i'm remembering correctly what I've read in the forum, I would have to use Maple midi in conjunction with the Kompakt program? I understand that it is a free download. Would Kompakt still be the program of choice if I wanted to include front ensemble sounds as well as battery sounds?
Thanks again.

The limitation with Kompakt is that you can only run 8 channels at a time. You can however run up to 4 instances of Kompakt at once for a total of 32 channels. There is a post on the Kompakt/Kontakt forum on how to do this. Make sure you have plenty of memory on your computer to do this though as it is quite a drain on your system.

Kontakt is capable of handling up to 16 channels I believe.

Here's the link to the thread about loading multiple instances of Kompakt.
https://www.tapspace.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=197

Yes, Kontakt will load 16 instruments as opposed to Kompakt's 8 voices, but if you load multiple instances, this may not really be a limitation.