Hello, I'm new to the forum and I would like to comment on the A vs B tests of playing the EW demo on the Erard.
I play on a Yamaha P80 keyboard through a Tascam US-122 which give very good results (48 kHz sampling, inaudible latency, seemingly boundless polyphony)
I agree with Guillaume that settings can be optimized for midi playback and optimized differently for real time playing depending on the hardware used.
For example, the P80 is harder than most keyboards. That fine tuning is one of the many virtues of pianoteq...
I also agree with most people that the Erard is the best sounding preset yet. I suspect more samples of the instrument were used for modelling since the other presets have in my opinion portions of the range which are less realistic than others. (I also like a lot the Grimaldi harpsichord).
I use the US-122 also with GigaStudio 3 LE playing mostly the Sampletekk Black Grand which is my other favorite instrument, much larger of course, around 6 gigabytes in samples for the ambient perspective. This version of GigaStudio (which came with the US-122) is limited to 64 (32 stereo) voices polyphony so I really enjoy the lifting of that limit that pianoteq gives me.
Also GigaStudio is pretty paranoïd in its license enforcing, modifying a large encypted file which must not be tampered with (no windows breakpoint/restore allowed ! ). I appreciate the simple licensing for pianoteq.
For comparison I will try to upload the piano solo piece played by the Black Grand which is also very nice sounding.
The file name is: BlackGrand.mp3
By the way, I have encountered a puzzling side-effect while doing A/B comparison of playing files with windows media player while leaving pianoteq running:
Most files are encoded at 44.1 Khz and I use pianoteq at the 48kHz sampling frequency. Maybe this is unique to the US-122, but media player leaves the unit at 44.1 kHz while pianoteq feeds it with 48kHz samples... the result is almost a tone flat...quite surprising at first !
Of course, restarting pianoteq or playing back something sampled at 48 kHz cures the problem, but it took me some time figuring it out...
Other nice midi files to play on the Erard may be found here: http://www.mta.ca/music/academics/diskl...uss_R.html
These are real time accompaniments for Richard Strauss songs...You can sing along the vocal part...if you can...