Looking to sell my Pianoteq Standard license to transition over to a sampled workflow. My base license includes three excellent, highly requested add-on instruments:

• Steinway Model D
• Shigeru Kawai SK-EX
• YC5 Rock Grand

Price is a flat $190 USD

I will fully cover the official €29 Modartt license transfer fee out of this sale price, so there are no hidden backend costs for you. Once payment is received, I will instantly initiate the official transfer to your registered Modartt email address.

Payment via PayPal Goods & Services only. Please send me a PM if you are interested!

*Note: Cross-listed on KVR/KnobCloud. First time-stamped message secures the license.*

(edit: it could be that I have only tried out a Yamaha C5X and a Steinway Model S in person)

Ive eliminated all possibilities of it being my hardware (ATH-R30X with correction) or other plugins

This seems to be most prevalent on the Kawai SK-EX and only a bit on the Steinway Model B, and out of all 3 pianos I own the Bosendorfer seems have the most realism out of the bunch but it still varies by preset.

This might be up to personal preference (likely) honestly but if you have any thoughts or ideas about this feel free to reply.

One of my favorite piano VSTs, Piano in Blue has a warm and rich sound that is highly desirable for jazz and classical. I have successfully got a similar sound using the following settings:

Steinway B Warm
Hammer hardness: 0.50
Mic position A-B

Octave stretching set to 0 (for the low registers to thunder)

Don’t worry about things like string length cause they always make it sound worse it seems. And I recommend always using a separate reverb plugin as opposed to the one in Pianoteq; I use Valhalla Reverb.

Any questions? What Piano VST/sound should I replicate next?

I am an "early intermediate player" at the age of 53. Hence, I feel that my "mechanical learning abilities" are somewhat limited. One limitation appears when playing fast staccato runs. After some notes, they tend to turn more into legato. This appears particularly if the fifth finger is involved. Maybe this problem is not relevant for more advanced or younger players. So I am looking for your comments.

Although I now that this problem could be also handled using external tools in your midi chain, I would like to see a "staccato pedaling" functionality directly inside Pianoteq. Pianoteq already has a beautiful set of pedals of which some are not available in traditional pianos. The additional pedal could support fast staccato/staccatissimo runs. The functionality could be implemented as follows:

When this pedal is pressed down, Pianoteq automatically generates “note off” events for each pressed key (i.e. according to each "note on") after a definable number of milliseconds. For keeping longer notes/chords in the left (or right) hand while rushing through staccato notes with the other hand, there should be a definable split point above (or below) of which the function is active. It would be nice, if the number of milliseconds could be also “humanized”. It would be even better, if there could be a defined range of milliseconds in case this function is assigned to an “analog” pedal, so the length of the note depends on the way the pedal is being pressed (i.e. if the used hardware pedal sends not only a pressed/released signal but also a value). To make it perfect, there could be an additional parameter which defines the note off value for this automated release, so the release could be more less "hard".

I would like to have this feature for "cheating" in some classical material, where the result would be staccato while I really play some sluggish legato...

Would that be useful for anyone else, or is it just me?

Best regards,

   Pete

I've been using Linux exclusively for over 15 years, but I have found it difficult to get a stable sound from Pianoteq 9. I am using JACK, and the issue is a crackling sound while playing. To me, this is obviously an issue with audio processing not keeping up, and possibly causing extra latency (more on this later--needs to be better understood). My computer runs an Intel i7-4770 4-core (8-thread) CPU running @ 3.4 GHz, with 16 GB RAM, on Ubuntu 24.04, and the audio chipset is on the motherboard. This machine does no other tasks except process audio, and so it's a bit surprising that more tuning is needed, since this computer is no slouch! I followed all tips in the readme file, and have configured real-time scheduling for the audio user in /etc/security/limits.conf, and I've added my user account to the audio group. No issues there, since that fixed the error messages seen on the command line and reduced the latency to something that sounds fairly good..... but it still crackled.

After searching for better help, I found some discussion on this forum around lowering the audio buffer size from the default 256 to 128 to reduce latency (hoping this will also reduce the crackling), implying buffer size can be adjusted from within Pianoteq. This is not the case, however, since Pianoteq does not allow this value to be adjusted from within. After a lot of reading and fighting, I was able to adjust the buffer size from QjackCtl. So I adjusted the buffer size down from 256 to 128, which should reduce the latency from about 5 ms to 2.5 ms, however that resulted in a LOT more crackling. I don't really want to increase the latency, however I then increased the buffer size from the original 256 to 512, which increased the latency from 5 ms to 10 ms ... AND THAT REDUCED MOST OF THE CRACKLING! I should also note that I have the sampling rate set to 48 kHz.

So here is the first important takeaway from this discovery, which is not pointed out very well in the readme file or help on the forums: Buffer size needs to be adjusted to find a compromise between latency and crackling; a larger buffer size will reduce crackling at the expense of increased latency, and a smaller buffer size will decrease latency at the expense of more crackling. Generally, <= 10 ms of latency is acceptable, but > 10 ms is where it really starts to feel laggy.

So I have my buffer size set to 512, which gives me 10 ms of latency with very little crackling, but if I want to eliminate all crackling entirely, then I set the buffer size to 1024, which results in 20 ms of latency, which feels terrible.

So that brings me to my questions (for anyone who still cares). With 4 cores (8 threads) running at 3.4 GHz, I think I should be able to reduce my buffer size back to 256 with 5 ms latency without crackling.... so why is this a problem? I don't see how this software performs well on lesser CPU specs, but yet I am sure it does (too many videos out there where I hear no crackling at all). What is being over looked here? (I have also run the cpufreq-set command to put all 8 cpus into performance mode; this made no perceptible difference, as expected, since these CPUs are already powerful and doing no other tasks).

Any Ideas? for those in the know, please share your knowledge and experiences! THANKS!!

-Rob

There are many - it seems you can't load all at once to choose from. Is that right? It's just one at a time?

And they seem to be labelled L and R, left and right presumably, but I don't see how you would load both?

If you can make an offer that is substantially below the current 140€ Price Tag when including the 29€ license transfer fee. Reach out to me with a forum mail or respond to this post.

https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=12870

How do you use an external reverb with Pianoteq?

I did just find the install puts in a local HTML version.

Does anyone out there actually prefer Pianoteq 8 to 9?