Hello Spencer,  To get a good piano sound on your computer, you need
either a wavetable sound card or a software-synthesizer which uses good
piano samples.  The MIDI player software, like the Windows Media
Player, uses the sounds available from your sound card or soft-synth to
play the MIDI files.

I have a set of piano samples from a Steinway Model C Grand piano,
which have been made into a balanced, realistic sounding piano sample
set.  These are available for free download from my web site in either
the SF2 file format, which can be used with a Soundblaster AWE32 or
AWE64 sound card, or in the WFP file format, which can be used in the
Turtle Beach Wavefront sound cards.  You need about 4 Megs of sample
memory in your sound cards to use these piano sounds.  You can download
the free Grand piano sound fonts at: http://www.trachtman.org/ragtime

I am just about to release larger, even better sounding piano sound
files which require 8 Megs of memory for a 2 velocity-layered set of
samples; or 12 Megs of sound card memory for a 3 velocity-layered set
of samples.  There will also be a few different 4 Meg versions to
choose from, made with different sample sets as a baseline.  I will
also make available a CD ROM full of several hundred megabytes of
samples of all 88 notes with long duration decay, 44 kHz stereo
samples.

For a subset of these (spaced at a minor third over the keyboard)
multiple samples made at several different strike velocities will
be available.  These can be used to make even larger versions of the
sound fonts, or used with full-blown MIDI samplers.  I will be updating
my web site (www.trachtman.org/ragtime) in the next few days with
details of the new, larger sound fonts and piano sample CD.

I am also planning to make a very large (20-30 Meg) piano sound font
for use with a shareware software based MIDI rendering package called
"Audio Compositor".

If you have a _very_ fast computer, this package can play the MIDI
files in real-time, much like the Windows Media player.  However, it's
real use is to create a WAV format file from a MIDI file using sound
sample file sets larger than most sound cards can accommodate.  Creating
the high quality WAV format file may take a few extra minutes, but the
WAV file can then be played back in real-time using any standard, cheap
sound card and the Windows Media Player, or any other wave file player
software.

Hope this is helpful.

Regards,

Warren Trachtman
(warren@trachtman.org)
http://www.trachtman.org/

 [ Warren's piano sounds are featured on George Bogatko's Slottime
 [ cassette, "Nickelodeon Toe Tappers", a fine album which I enjoy
 [ very much!  -- Robbie