If you ask me, too expensive and too much of a hard-drive hog, as all samples are

Yeah.
I read on their website "only 37 GB of space on your hard disk"
ONLY ??? lol !

My installed Pianoteq including historic instruments, bells, and C3ls PTQ addons only is something like 15 MB :-)

And on my EeePC I have the "mda Piano VSTi". 1.5 MB and totally free. It has an ugly interface. But it is very cheap - it is free - and it doesn't even sound really bad. Actually it is quite good for a lightweight free sampled Piano VSTi plugin as long as you don't compare it with Pianoteq.

You should be able to find the mda Piano VSTi plugin with some googling. There is also a mda ePiano electric piano plugin.

Well Vienna (VSL) has really went and made one new amazing piano library called "Vienna Imperial".  This thing is a beast and sounds beautiful.  I can't wait to throw some of my midi files at it (and then try to tweak my Pianoteq to get the same results lol).

It has a somewhat similar interface to Pianoteq.

http://vsl.co.at/en/211/442/478/1701/1706/1309.htm

People said they wanted a world class Bosendorfer, VSL has it (for 900.00 American Dollars).  Let's see what "we" can do about that.  I sure would "hate" to see anyone from Pianoteq to come up with a setting that's as good as that thing .

Maestro2be

I DL'd the demo mp3 from VSL's site and compared it to a rendering of a midi file I found at:

http://www.kunstderfuge.com/scriabin.htm

I thought I could hear some strange notes that don't seem to fit with the actual music.  For example, the very first note in the treble should be "middle C#", but the VSL rendering seems to play it one octave higher.

Of course the dynamics of the two are very different, but shouldn't the notes come out at the same pitch?

I will render and save to mp3 on the PT site if anyone wishes.

Glenn

I have misgivings about any system being fast enough to stream samples from hard disk and *then* decompress them in memory fast enough.  What is "enough"?  I should be able to play anything I want at any speed with any degree of Sustain without it choking.

Do they do the compression just to save on disk space, or to actually overcome data transfer limitations? Both maybe, but I suspect the data transfer is a big problem, and that the compression is a reasonable trade-off between disk access and CPU costs. I would assume that PC architecture allows data transfer and decompression processes to be going on at the same time.

Anyway, thanks to pianoteq, I'm glad I don't need to worry about any of that. It was hard to feel musically inspired when I used to spend hours ironing out sample playback glitches on my old laptop.

I also have some reservations about the in-memory decompression.  Hauptwerk can do this now, but the gains in RAM are only about 40% at best and it is very sample-dependent.  Hauptwerk, like PTQ, is programmed extremely tightly with severe performance optimizations yet  Vienna is claiming compression of 10:1? 

I have misgivings about any system being fast enough to stream samples from hard disk and *then* decompress them in memory fast enough.  What is "enough"?  I should be able to play anything I want at any speed with any degree of Sustain without it choking. 

That is the benchmark set by Pianoteq.  My PC is very modest by today's standards yet I have no performance problems with Pianoteq Stand-alone.

I suppose the bottom line for me is that I would love to have a Bosendorfer, but I'm not going to spend over 500 sheets for it, particularly when the playability won't (can't) be a patch on PTQ.   If one became available as a 3rd party PTQ add-on I would gladly buy it.

Regards,
Neil

I know EXACTLY what you're saying! 

Musicians will understand this.

You are a musician.

If it doesn't play well, then how could I create a midi file that could be used for later conversion to a wave file?  I'll explain:

All of us know that the response from a piano to our playing greatly affects our response to how we play it, and thus to what we get out of it.

If we play a song live (while recording the midi file), and then render the midi file to wave, it must be done on the same "piano" or it won't sound the same.  So if it doesn't respond well, the result will be less (or different) than what we want.

This has been the fundamental weakness of samples; they don't respond well to live playing, which makes it difficult to create a midi that reflects how we play it.

If I recorded a midi using (for example) an organ sound, and then tried to render it to a piano sound, it would simply not work because I would instinctively play an organ sound differently than I would a piano sound.

I know this is a bit abstract, but hope that others can follow what I'm saying.

Glenn

It has a somewhat similar interface to Pianoteq.

http://vsl.co.at/en/211/442/478/1701/1706/1309.htm

People said they wanted a world class Bosendorfer, VSL has it (for 900.00 American Dollars).  Let's see what "we" can do about that.  I sure would "hate" to see anyone from Pianoteq to come up with a setting that's as good as that thing .

Maestro2be