U4 would be the less CPU resources demanding pianoteq piano I have!

You can try to increase the latency setting in Pianoteq (or in the ASIO driver settings depending on which ASIO or DirectSound driver you use).  Latency is sometimes controlled by the DAW itself, if you're not running the standalone.  Often increasing latency by a few milliseconds is enough to handle the more demanding libraries in real-time with noticeably impacting playback responsiveness.  Also, keeping the pedal engaged for long periods of time can increase overhead substantially, so sometimes I use the pedal less on loud or fast passages, if I find the CPU is starting to get overloaded as I play.

I also suspect the reason that 5 is faster than 6 is that 6.1 introduced a new ambient air simulation model, which may have increased the processing load somewhat.

I have a powerful laptop where I have pianoteq installed but which I and the members of my family use for multiple purposes, so I have a small oldish netbook (a Sony Vaio, two cores AMD-350 processor 1,60 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM) which stays permanently on top of my electric piano (midi keyboard) and which I ordinarily use as a sound module when playing (just because it is handy and more comfortable to have it there always connected to my keyboard).

ethanay wrote:

Alejandro55 wrote:

I have a powerful laptop where I have pianoteq installed but which I and the members of my family use for multiple purposes, so I have a small oldish netbook (a Sony Vaio, two cores AMD-350 processor 1,60 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM) which stays permanently on top of my electric piano (midi keyboard) and which I ordinarily use as a sound module when playing (just because it is handy and more comfortable to have it there always connected to my keyboard).

What is your Pianoteq performance index saying? (I love that measurement, so useful!)

What operating system are you using? (How) have you performance tuned it to maximize low latency throughput? Especially if you are just using it for this single purpose, there is a lot you can do. Low latency DSP and cpu frequency scaling are not compatible with each-other. So if you can lock your cpu at the highest frequency while playing you will get greater headroom before xruns/DSP overload.

IIRC my core2duo laptop got about 25 on the index. My new i5 6265u scores much better.

My small netbook which I leave on top of my piano keyboard and keep connected to it, is working on Windows 7 32 bits. I already described its other characteristics. CPU Frequency 1.600 Mhz.

In that computer, I tried setting the internal sample rate to 22050 Hz for both Pianoteq 5 and 6, keeping the ASIO bufer size set to the values I mentioned above (256 samples for pianoteq 5, 384 samples for version 6 and 512 samples for RealBand). Doing that, I can play every piano (normal playing) not getting the CPU overloaded (at the expense of sound quality?).
Having done that, with Pianoteq 5 I do not overload the system when playing the U4 or the Seintway Model B no matter how crazily I might try to hit keys while pressing the sustain pedal.
Different with Pianoteq 6, with which if I hit keys like mad while pressing the sustain pedal, the U4 does not collapse but the Stainway Model B does and the C Bechstein DG does it sooner. None does now if I play normally.

These are the Pianoteq performance index numbers that I read (if forcing the pianos’ polyphony to the maximum I could) that interest you: Pianoteq 5: fluctuating from 10 to 12 but reaching sometimes 14 as a maximum. Pianoteq 6: does not go over 10. Pianoteq 5 loaded into RealBand: does not go over 11.
You are obviously much more audio technical oriented than me, so you might conclude something from the numbers I gave you.

I have not problems at all with my other notebook, but that one I plug to my keyboard piano only now and again as my wife or son might want to use it while I play / practice piano. With this one I can as well load some big sampled pianos I have (the bigger being 14 GB) and can play them having no conflict and I can also play some virtual electric pianos that I have that only work on a 64 bits system. By the way, I also have both Pianoteq’s electric piano collections but although I love them, I tend to play much more using acoustic piano sounds.
This more potent notebook that I have is a Hewlett Packard Intel Core(TM) i5-5200U CPU 2.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, with Windows 10 64 bits.

Alejandro55 wrote:

ethanay wrote:

What is your Pianoteq performance index saying? (I love that measurement, so useful!)

What operating system are you using? (How) have you performance tuned it to maximize low latency throughput? Especially if you are just using it for this single purpose, there is a lot you can do. Low latency DSP and cpu frequency scaling are not compatible with each-other. So if you can lock your cpu at the highest frequency while playing you will get greater headroom before xruns/DSP overload.

IIRC my core2duo laptop got about 25 on the index. My new i5 6265u scores much better.

My small netbook which I leave on top of my piano keyboard and keep connected to it, is working on Windows 7 32 bits. I already described its other characteristics. CPU Frequency 1.600 Mhz.

In that computer, I tried setting the internal sample rate to 22050 Hz for both Pianoteq 5 and 6, keeping the ASIO bufer size set to the values I mentioned above (256 samples for pianoteq 5, 384 samples for version 6 and 512 samples for RealBand). Doing that, I can play every piano (normal playing) not getting the CPU overloaded (at the expense of sound quality?).
Having done that, with Pianoteq 5 I do not overload the system when playing the U4 or the Seintway Model B no matter how crazily I might try to hit keys while pressing the sustain pedal.
Different with Pianoteq 6, with which if I hit keys like mad while pressing the sustain pedal, the U4 does not collapse but the Stainway Model B does and the C Bechstein DG does it sooner. None does now if I play normally.

These are the Pianoteq performance index numbers that I read (if forcing the pianos’ polyphony to the maximum I could) that interest you: Pianoteq 5: fluctuating from 10 to 12 but reaching sometimes 14 as a maximum. Pianoteq 6: does not go over 10. Pianoteq 5 loaded into RealBand: does not go over 11.
You are obviously much more audio technical oriented than me, so you might conclude something from the numbers I gave you.

I have not problems at all with my other notebook, but that one I plug to my keyboard piano only now and again as my wife or son might want to use it while I play / practice piano. With this one I can as well load some big sampled pianos I have (the bigger being 14 GB) and can play them having no conflict and I can also play some virtual electric pianos that I have that only work on a 64 bits system. By the way, I also have both Pianoteq’s electric piano collections but although I love them, I tend to play much more using acoustic piano sounds.
This more potent notebook that I have is a Hewlett Packard Intel Core(TM) i5-5200U CPU 2.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, with Windows 10 64 bits.

Glad to know that.

The Eletric Pianos package also requires little CPU.

Historic pianos also demand less CPU, I discovered it by accident when using a raspberry pi 3

marcos daniel wrote:

I can confirm that Kremsegg 1 & 2, Erard 1922 and Pleyel 1926 are less resources hungry.
Erard, Peyel and Bechstein (from Kremsegg) are modern grands, suitables for most music styles (I think). They don't sound as good as the grands you buy singly but they are nicer to me than internal sounds of my digital pianos.

The same on my side. Any of the pianoteq’s pianos sound better than the internal sound of my digital piano.

Since I decided to learn to play the piano (already being quite a mature grown up man) and bought my digital piano, I have been in a quest to find the ultimate piano sound, something that would make me feel as if I was playing a real piano. On those days I bought a sound module, the Emu Proformance (which I don’t have any more as my son broke it) and later on a Kurzweil KMP-1 which I still have screwed underneath my digital piano and connected to it. Then came my search for a convincing virtual piano (my first better sounding one was the one from the Super Quartet dxi/vst from Edirol and afterwards the GIGA pianos for GigaSampler, but those and others following were not yet good enough).

It was not until nowadays that I came to be happy with a piano sound and feel I can finally settle down. Computers are much more powerful these days and huge advances had been reached on manipulating and featuring sound. Pianoteq sounds and feels to me quite as if I am playing a real piano and I have a few very convincing sampled pianos that sound good. And it is not that I can’t make comparisons, because I had the opportunity of playing a few fairly good sounding uprights and two nice Grand pianos while I was taking piano lesson.

EvilDragon wrote:

You cannot expect miracles from a 1.6 GHz CPU.

No, I wasn’t expecting miracles from a 1.6 Ghz CPU, and specially not for it being a netbook and not even a notebook, but got one anyway and Pianoteq helped to make the Miracle come true.

I can have that insignificant netbook (which I originally bought to be able to carry around with me for working purposes) perfectly suited to fit on top of my digital piano and always keep connected to it, allowing me to use as it a sound module and to be able to play a virtual instrument that sounds as a real piano, and even to trigger simultaneously some accompaniments to play along with.

I have several virtual pianos, but being Pianoteq the one I prefer, it happens to be the one that I can use with that small netbook. Other virtual pianos that I have and I can play using my netbook do not satisfy me. I have some big sampled pianos that sound quite good, but my netbook can’t cope with them (my other notebook which I now and again connect to my digital piano obviously does). The only smaller sampled piano that I have that my netbook can manage and sounds reasonably well (though not enough and not as good as Pianoteq) is Sampletekk Black (powered by Kontakt).

So, miracles, sometimes, might certainly happen.