Quality, but simple, GM Playback for Sibelius?

[Releaux]

Greetings, all. My dad is a long-time composer/arranger and has been using Sibelius for a few years now, but only for notation - not playback. He recently asked me to help him put together a system that would let him use a keyboard for input and play things back for him.

All of that is straightforward enough, but he's not a computer whiz, so I want this system to be as straightforward as possible. I listened to the built-in playback samples on the Sibelius site and, while they're better than they were, they still sound tinny when doing full concert and marching band scores.

I know this is kind of an inherent problem with any General MIDI playback, but my JV-2080, K2600, and Fantom XR all sound better than what I heard coming out of Sibelius.

So I have two questions:

1. What would you recommend as a master keyboard? If I can find good in-the-box sounds (see question 2), this can be a MIDI controller, otherwise I'm leaning toward the current workstation-class synths (e.g., Fantom G8) because they're likely to have the best core instruments.

2. Are there any GM compatible soft-synths or Sibelius plug-ins that are up to the task? Native Instrument's BandStand looked promising, but is apparently dead. While I know the various orchestras-in-a-box are good, it has to be simple. He's not going to be tweaking samples or selecting sound variations - I'd like the software to do that if possible.

Budget isn't as much of an issue as ease-of-use and quality sound. I've done some shopping, but so far have only found solutions that either sound bad or require major tweakage.

Also, nothing is set in stone. I think he wants to stay with Sibelius and the Mac, but doesn't really have a preference beyond that.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

What style(s) of music are we talking about here? Orchestral? Marching Band? Jazz? Klezmer?

Depending on the answer to that, you should get a few recommendations. Personally, I use a mix of several onboard and outboard devices and software to get a decent sound as no one Vi or synth is going to cover all the bases.

As for controllers with onboard sounds, I'm very happy with my Kurzweil PC88 and PC2 (they are up to PC 3 unless they announced PC 4 at NAMM.) Good sounds overall, but still not everything I need. Caveat: I use Finale and the Garritan sounds that come with it are pretty decent, as are some of the other Garritan packages.

[Releaux]

Thanks for the response. I wasn't explicit about style, but the majority will be concert band and marching band.

I know there's no magic bullet, so I'm looking for the one bullet with the highest concentration of magic. =-) As I said, the less futzing he has to do with loading soundsets or patches, the happier we'll both be.

Perhaps a more useful question would be:

In your opinion, what Sibelius-compatible software or outboard device has the best GM implementation?