drivers can be a pain sometimes, glad you got it sorted

But I think I've fixed it. I looked up the latest version of the Realtek sound drivers (which seems to be newer than the latest Windows Update version), and installed it. It seems to have fixed the problem O_O

Which means there was nothing wrong with my recording, it was the way my PC was playing back the sound. It's very odd, as the clicks would happen in the same spot during playback, making me think it was part of the actual waveform. I've never noticed an audio issue outside of this.

Anyway, so far so good.

thanks

try out clicking the "Action" button on the main interface and lower the "Key release noise" and optionally also lower the "Sustain pedal noise". The soft click sounds like the key release noise to me.

Those are sounds you will hear with a real piano but thankfully there's a lot of control over it via the tools to make things sound better to your ears or just less noisy, or more.

Other thing standing out in your clip is reverb - depending on your tastes you might want to click "Effects" and try out a few different ones, or just lower that effect to hear less noise if you want a clearer overall sound. Just a few thoughts - but..

Recently posted some things you can do in Pianoteq Stage to alter your presets, hope it also helps. Cheers.

In the recording, listen for a soft click immediate at the end of every short key hit. For the long notes, listen about 1-2 seconds after the attack. The audio click will be during the sustain. A couple clicks will be hard to hear, but most will be obvious when you know what to listen for.

The recording was of the Steinway D Prelude. No effects or equalizer was changed from their default values.
The problem is not due to a crap PC. My CPU is an i5-9600K and I have 32GB RAM. The CPU is set to max performance in the power settings. I tried the ASIO driver and that didn't make a difference.

I've also noticed that during the demo period, on the rare occasion one key will not play. It's not one of the disabled notes, because if I hit it again, it'll play fine. This is also strange.