What is GM, GS, XG, FM, and AWE?
GM stands for General MIDI. GM is a standard developed in the early Nineties that would allow MIDI music created on one device to be played on another and sound relatively the same. Prior to this, each MIDI device would put different instruments on the different patch numbers, so a piano on one keyboard could turn out to be a tuba on another. Your sound card had better be GM, or you got ripped off, even if you didn’t pay anything for it. GS stands for… Well, I’ve heard “General Standard” and “General Sound”, and I don’t really care what it stands for exactly. Anyway, GS is an extension to GM, which allows 128 different instrument sounds on each of the 128 standard GM instruments. So, in theory, with a full GS sound set, one could have 128 different Acoustic Nylon Guitars, and 128 different Xylophones, etc. In practice, however, the extra sound sets are used for various sound effects, like barking dogs. On a non-GS card, any GS instruments used will default back to the GM standard pat
