Greg.

Thank you,
C

I'm ready to pick up Pianoteq now - any ideas on my earlier question on whether the Rock Add-on promotion is only applicable if I purchase from www.pianoteq.com?

The promotion is applicable everywhere and concerns all who activate their licence before the end of this month. So you can go ahead purchasing from any dealer. If a dealer does not have Pianoteq in stock, he can order from the distributor - complete list here.

I'm ready to pick up Pianoteq now - any ideas on my earlier question on whether the Rock Add-on promotion is only applicable if I purchase from www.pianoteq.com?

One must keep in mind that when a developer of samples/whatever compares their product to others, they will not tweak the competitions' sounds to produce the best sound as they do with their own.

As soon as I heard the voice, I knew who produced the comparison mp3 - Bluthner Digital Model One.  They have had these on their site for ages, although this particular mp3 is a newer one than I heard a year ago.  Of course it is Chopin's Scherzo Opus 31.

The mp3 that I DL'd last year was certainly using Pianoteq 2, not Pianoteq 3, and I doubt that this newest one used Pianoteq 3.05 (which we are all using, and is undoubtedly much better than even the first issue of 3.0).

Glenn

This is the same piece played live on a real piano - http://www.proaudiovault.com/comparison...ces-ff.mp3 - they still have the edge in my opinion. Even some of the sample libraries had some weird high frequency stuff going on compared to the real recording. The Garritan Steinway and Ivory were the best in my opinion.

I'm really amazed with all the tweaking possibilities with Pianoteq though - that piano size tip really was impressive.

And come to think of it, experiment with the Piano size parameter, which you must access through the Options\Midi dialog box and assign to a controller. (Not the same thing as String length.)

Thanks for mentioning this, Jake -- I had forgotten all about it!

I'm not saying that you necessarily want to greatly reduce the size of the piano. Slightly different sizes, however, interact with all of the other parameters to create very different sounds--moving the controller you assign one or two steps will give you an entirely different piano. A little frightening, at times, the amount of control you have over the sound as you coordinate all of the parameters.

(...) I also noticed I have to lay off the sustain pedal compared to sample libraries.

This is part of an important difference between Pianoteq and Samplers. Like a real piano and unlike samplers Pianoteq has inner reverb components called "sympathetic resonance" and "global resonance". They emulate the influence between different strings with common harmonics. When the sustain pedal is being pressed, all strings are free to resonate in a cluster that can even reverberate noisy components like hammer noises. So maybe you wish to reduce global resonance (which you couldn't on real pianos). Also you might like to reduce the damping duration (I always reduce it from 1s to about 0,7s). When you release the damper very shortly, the strings are not completely damped and will continue to sound a little bit when sustain is pressed again. No sampler can do these things. You can decide not to like it, but if you just try to consider these effects, you will enjoy pianoteq because of its naturalness.