There is also a lot of sampler/sequencers/synth (see Animoog, FL Studio, ...)
The iPad is only lacking a great piano voice ... Due to sheer size, it won't be possible to get something like Galaxy's or Ivory's sample bank ... But Pianoteq might be a dream come true.
So are you working on an iPad version or Pianoteq ?? If not, why (Apple A5 got not enough horsepower ?) If yes, then when do you plan to release it perhaps with v4 ?
The iPad is only lacking a great piano voice ... Due to sheer size, it won't be possible to get something like Galaxy's or Ivory's sample bank ... But Pianoteq might be a dream come true.
This idea has been up here before, and I am also very much hoping for this...
In fact, I would be very disappointed, if the next release did not include an iPhone/iPad App, - it is so obviously a good idea...
The iPad is only lacking a great piano voice ... Due to sheer size, it won't be possible to get something like Galaxy's or Ivory's sample bank ... But Pianoteq might be a dream come true.
This idea has been up here before, and I am also very much hoping for this...
In fact, I would be very disappointed, if the next release did not include an iPhone/iPad App, - it is so obviously a good idea...
So when do you release the iPad edition of Pianoteq :-)
I don't think iPad's CPU is enough for Pianoteq's processing needs at all.
What do you base that assumption on? iPads do not appear to be slow..
From the FAQ: What kind of CPU (processor) do I need? PIANOTEQ is CPU intensive software for it computes the sound in real time. However, most modern computers already offer a fully sufficient CPU. We recommend a CPU with dual or multiple cores, such as the Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD X2. By restricting polyphony or the internal sample rate in the Options menu, you can work with less powerful CPU's.
I'm also thinking it might be sufficient, thus the new A6 that's part of the iPhone and the next iPad seems more than sufficient (see anandtech review of it, pretty interesting with a lot of figures to compare to)
In any case, however this discussion about CPU power is not completely relevant, even though it's interesting. One side or the other, it's only wild guess before moddart tells us it has tested it ....
800 MHz to 1 GHz. Definitely not enough for Pianoteq. Plus, it's not x86 architecture, it's ARM. Pianoteq would need complete recoding for that. I don't think that would happen.
800 MHz to 1 GHz. Definitely not enough for Pianoteq.
Clock speed isn't everything. According to Geekbench, the iPad 3 processor is about half speed of the slowest Intel Core 2 Duo, and with a bit of polyphony reduction, effects reduction, a little more latency, and tweaking here and there it should be possible. It isn't as if Pianoteq usually runs with 100% CPU on a normal desktop. Also it might be able to use the GPU (?).
EvilDragon wrote:
Plus, it's not x86 architecture, it's ARM. Pianoteq would need complete recoding for that. I don't think that would happen.
If it was coded in assembler, that would of course be a problem, but why would they have done that? Most compute intensive applications are written in low level languages like C, and iOS applications are usually written in objective-C, which is just C with classes...
This is all speculation, but until we get a definite no from Pianoteq, I remain quite optimistic :-)
Probably not without some decent restructuring of the code, and additional latency. Anyways, I don't think polyphony or sound quality would be satisfying at all with all those restrictions. That's why I think Modartt shouldn't bother with iPad version at all.
jensgk wrote:
and iOS applications are usually written in objective-C, which is just C with classes...
IIRC, Pianoteq is done in C++ with JUCE framework.
Even if the later iPads have just about enough power, do you really want them running full throttle? These things have no fan, and can get warm, or at least drain the battery rather quickly! That processor power is maybe best used in bursts.
I own a recent Asus TF300 tablet featuring a quad core NVidia Tegra 3 processor running at 1.2 GHz (about the same processing power as an iPad 2, I believe), and I don't think it is capable of running Pianoteq at all.
The two or three free piano apps that I tried on it have huge latency even with a single note, and I don't think this is due to on-screen keyboard note recognition since the touch reaction is pretty much instantaneous everywhere else (running the latest Android JellyBean version).
Maybe the latency is due to under-optimized sound treatment of course, but, still, running Pianoteq on a tablet requires all the computations needed by the model, even if input keyboard and output sound generator could be external (which is not possible on my tablet anyway).
Add to that the fact that a convolution reverb is very cpu-intensive, and profits on the x86 architecture from dedicated SSE* instructions that I believe are absent on the ARM architecture.
I see that JUCE now supports ARM so maybe I'm wrong in thinking that it's impossible, but I would rather see improvements in the model requiring more cpu than tweaking everything so that it can run marginally (only legacy reverb?) on something designed mostly for graphics and net surfing.
The two or three free piano apps that I tried on it have huge latency even with a single note, and I don't think this is due to on-screen keyboard note recognition since the touch reaction is pretty much instantaneous everywhere else (running the latest Android JellyBean version).
It is a well known problem with Android, and it is why all professional music apps are made for iOS.
The thing is that there are many, really very very good musical instrument apps available for iOS. They are quite advanced, and there is NO latency. They are a joy to use.
Some of these apps are made by world famous instrument manufacturers such as Moog, Yamaha, Korg, and Akaipro. Got to their websites and look for their iOS apps and demos.
Just to get a feeling on how far this has gone, and how active this area is, have a look at these links:
The "Sonic Touch"-series here is an almost monthly issue on new developments in iOS music apps. (Youtube link to a series of videos, press the link below the empty black square, that says video not available): http://www.youtube.com/user/sonicstate/...onic+touch
This is why I would like to get my favorite software piano on board before it is too late. I genuinely believe this is the future of mass market electronic music.
Interesting... I didn't know there was such an interest in iOS music making. There seems to be a use of the accelerometer for expression in some of these videos, a nice idea.
If I can still play devil's advocate, I might add that all these instruments seem sample-based, and thus much less cpu-dependent than Ptq. My point was mostly that these mobile cpus are no match for the demands of modelling, but I guess only Philippe or Julien can really answer if it's possible, or desirable...
If I can still play devil's advocate, I might add that all these instruments seem sample-based, and thus much less cpu-dependent than Ptq.
True, most of the sound engines are based on sampled waveforms, but a lot of signal processing is going on. Some of the synthesizers are based on several types of synthesis engines. The Alchemy Mobile synth is for example base on a mixture of "VA (virtual analog), sampler, granular and additive resynthesis", and the Impaktor Drum synth, that uses microphone sound as input, is based on physical modeling, frequency modulation, and noise shaping.
Gilles wrote:
My point was mostly that these mobile cpus are no match for the demands of modelling, but I guess only Philippe or Julien can really answer if it's possible, or desirable...
True, only they will know if they can find a business case for it.
Let's put it this way - I'd rather want Modartt IMPROVE the complexity of their physical model which would demand more powerful CPUs to provide us even better piano sound, rather than DEGRADE it to barely make it run with underpowered tablet CPUs.
Pianoteq is meant to be played with 88 piano-weighted keys with as much CPU power it can get. Tablets are not good enough for this yet.
I'm not sure what you're basing that opinion on. Current iPads are more powerful than my old eMac that I used to run Pianoteq on and you can connect any midi keyboard to an iPad.
More importantly though, you speak as though that Pianoteq development would suffer from releasing an iOS version and I don't think that's necessarily true. iOS is essentially a cut down version of OSX so a port should be relatively simple.
The real question is whether Moddartt would see enough income from an iOS version to make it worthwhile. It's quite possible that increased revenue from a mobile version could actually benefit the desktop version.
Incidentally IKMultimedia have released a pro quality piano app (iGrand Piano) which people are successfully gigging. Of course that's a sample based piano so has different requirements to Pianoteq.
I'm afraid that not everything in this world is as simple as just "More Power".
That's especially true in the computing world. Intel and AMD have raced for more Ghz sometimes ago, but that era has now ended (10 years ago at least)
A lot of work in the CPU area is now about efficiency, especially power efficiency. And in this area, Apple seems to be pretty good.
Moreover, if moddart was waiting/needing more CPU power to improve their physical model, they would be wrong, as they have actually plenty of CPU power unexploited in current generation of CPU. See, my Intel Core i5 CPU that's 2 years old is used only at 5% to 10% when playing complex music with latest Pianoteq
By the way, Tablets are already good enough to play Pianoteq. See for instance GeekBench benchmark that measures Integer / Floating point CPU and Memory performance (in other words, performance that is essential to pianoteq) : - my old intel core i5 scores about 9000 - the apple A6 (iphone 5 / ipad 4) scores about 1600 <= that should be enough power
At last, IMHO, the main point of pianoteq is to be a lightweight software that doesn't need tons of GB of storage and could be brought on stage or elsewhere easily (see pianoteq description :"The size of Pianoteq is just 20 MB (MegaBytes) ... You can use Pianoteq on any modern laptop and connect it to your MIDI compatible piano keyboard"
All in all, i think that the future of pianoteq is not to refine the physical model to use more CPU horsepower ... well if that was the case, moddart would already have done it ... and again, everything is not about power and definitely the current computing world trend is not in that direction. So I really think that, if moddart wants to exist in the future in any other way than as a niche product for some happy few, they need to take the train of new platforms .. and this is now, in a few year it would be too late as a lot of company with, in my opinion a lot less potential than moddart, have already taken a foot in...
Apple has sold 100 millions iPad to people of this world, and I'm pretty sure some of them are musicians or even pianists too
and again, everything is not about power and definitely the current computing world trend is not in that direction.
Not true. They're still going in the "more power" direction, except now, "more power" does not mean "more GHz", but "more cores", instead. And Pianoteq is multicore capable software. So... There's plenty of power left to be utilized by Modartt in improving the details of their physical modeling engine.
Let's put it this way - I'd rather want Modartt IMPROVE the complexity of their physical model which would demand more powerful CPUs to provide us even better piano sound, rather than DEGRADE it to barely make it run with underpowered tablet CPUs.
Pianoteq is meant to be played with 88 piano-weighted keys with as much CPU power it can get. Tablets are not good enough for this yet.
I don't have a tablet yet myself but I can understand that people would want to have PT running on a tablet, especially when gigging to have a lightweight easy solution. It's up to Modartt to see if the expected userbase on tablets would be large enough to make a Pianoteq-TAB version for it... If there's enough potential buyers and the app would run good enough, I think they won't mind degrading a specialized version if that will help getting more sales and thus, more resources to work on improving the desktop version....
Small, light, and very powerful laptops are available right now, that will run Pianoteq very well. They have a better formfactor too - they don't need add-ons just to make the screen stick up vertically so you can read the darn thing, and they come with REAL keyboards to boot. ;^)
I am using Pianoteq-4 (pianoteq user from version-3) without problems in pentium-m @1.5Ghz. Basically a Pentium-3 with SSE2. So I am deeply interest to optimizations and low cpu usage.
To my understanding iPad-2 computing power is about the same with my laptop. In reality, if the graphics card can co-compute with the cpu (like OpenCL) I am sure it's more powerful. So, it can be done. The first problem - I suppose - is the extra coding hassle. You need to re-write for arm-based proccessor in a new environment (iOS).
The second problem is portability. I play with my laptop + sound card + midi. The scenario to play with ipad + soundcard + midi is not major advance in portability.
If I could connect my midi keyboard via wifi (in logical price) to 'pianoteq-ed' ipad would be major advance in portability. I prefer via OSC
I'm bringing up this old thread because it is September, 2014 and I would still love to be able to run Pianoteq on my iPad for live performances.
My current best solution is to use the CMP Grand Piano which is a large streaming piano (1.7 GB with seven layers). I use it in the background with OnSong running in the foreground as my songbook.
This works well but I would much rather use Pianoteq models. Are there any current plans to make an IOS version of Pianoteq?
Not a real solution to this topic, but something interesting and for some use cases probably helpful:
This week I had to buy Parallels Desktop in order to run (hated) Windows 7 on my (beloved) Mac. I learned that it comes with a new product of them called Parallels Access http://www.parallels.com/de/products/access/.
Using that on my iPad I can remote control via WiFi my PT5 running on my Mac. That provides me the full sampling power of my Mac along with just a nice small iPad (mini) on my piano. The host application runs on Mac and Windows, the client app on iOS and Android. I don't know if they plan to have Linux host app, which would those of you who can build these tiny little Linux based PCs w/o screen to control them remotely from a tablet. Maybe you can enable a small windows to run on these machines, too ?
Haven't had real time to test the iPad/Mac combination, but will do so in the next day and just thought it would be useful to share this with you.
_______________________________________________________________________________________ PT5.1 Pro • D4 • K2 • U2 • MacBook Pro i7 2,8GHz 16GB/1TB • Roland F120R/RD64 • KEF X300A • DT990Pro
I know we feel diferent about operating system, and thats one reason I think Modart realy should extend compability even to work with iOS. iPad is a lot more portable (and cheaper) than a Macbook...
I know we feel diferent about operating system, and thats one reason I think Modart realy should extend compability even to work with iOS. iPad is a lot more portable (and cheaper) than a Macbook...
...and also absolutely in a different category concerning its CPU power. I.e., there's a reason its a lot cheaper, and Pianoteq needs a lot of processor power. An iPad probably just doesn't cut it, regardless how many people bug Modartt about it.
Pianoteq already offers incredible flexibility with no less than three completely different operating systems. Don't like Windows? No problem: just get a smallish MacBook and be happy. Or get a PC notebook and install Linux: no Windows either. But seriously: the operating system is a simple tool, and for a specialised application like this, I personally just wouldn't care. Windows works well enough, and for me that is enough.
What you want is actually something different: "Please Modartt, make Pianoteq magically four times as fast, i.e. running on cheap and weak ARM hardware like my iPad, because I want the mobility but I don't want to buy sufficient hardware power for it. And because I don't understand factors like huge effort, strong hardware limits and very limited demand, I just blame you, the programmers, for being lazy." Sorry, but that's how I see this.
In terms of existing support, the 3 platforms are all x86 which means the same core code can be deployed with only different UI/sound output output/VST code needed for each platforms. If we strip out just the core command line renderer, I bet that code would recompile on all Mac/Windows/Linux x86 without any changes (many open source examples -- stuff like FFMPEG are cross-platform compileable). In theory, pure C++ code written for x86 can be compiled on ARM also. In practice, you need a lot of #IF x86 #IF ARM code blocks.
The question is whether something like C++ would even compile directly on iOS. The language in iOS is Objective C. Google up iOS/C++ and you see people talk about downloading "C++ apps" which is pretty strange -- more like an emulator/sandbox instead of a full compiler. I mean it's not like you can simply copy your source code to an iPad and then compile ... not without jailbreaking your device first. Any iOS developers can give us the scoop on this?
By times a strange discussion, this... For me it seems obvious that there will be an ios version of pianoteq. This seems not a question of if, but of when. Apple reported 800 million ios devices sold by june of this year. For any commercially operating software company a figure like that should always raise some interest, I'd think.
To decide when it is technically or commercially viable to develop such a version is of course completely up to Modartt to decide; I would not expect them to need their customers' advice or expertise on such matters.
Just out of curiosity, why do some otherwise intelligent, competent and extremely helpful people seem to develop foam around the corners of their mouth whenever one of Modartt's customers expresses a wish to have an ios version of pianoteq?
Just out of curiosity, I am really curious as to why some otherwise intelligent, competent and extremely helpful people seem to develop foam around the corners of their mouth whenever one of Modartt's customers expresses a wish to have an ios version of pianoteq?
Because developing a new version for a completely different OS (by implementing an INFERIOR sounding model because ARM still can't compare to i5/i7 CPUs of the world as far as processing power goes) would take precious time that could be better spent to further improving Pianoteq's modeling, offering even better and more detailed sound.
There's just one thing to Modartt to think carefully (and I believe they've already thought about that):
People aren't willing to pay anything in iOS. They are used to feel that everything should cost just couple of bucks or be free. IMO PTQ is worth every cent of its price. So what should they charge from iPTQ?
Speaking about too low pricing in iOS: I've seen many apps which have great potential (like Genome MIDI sequencer) but which do not develop at all or develop painfully slow. I believe it's because of the pricing: those developers must have another job to make their living so there's no time and meaning to put their hours to these apps. This is especially when you make an app which has relatively small market. (Of course with 2 euros app you can become a millionaire if the market is huge and app becomes popular. Like our finnish Angry Birds game…)
Because developing a new version for a completely different OS (by implementing an INFERIOR sounding model because ARM still can't compare to i5/i7 CPUs of the world as far as processing power goes) would take precious time that could be better spent to further improving Pianoteq's modeling, offering even better and more detailed sound.
In the same way you could maintain that Google would have built a far superior searching engine, if they just had kept out of advertising.
And, suppose, that one day we have Ptq for iPad, but the iPad may not output enough power for your midi controller(say ”dont recognize the device”). Newer iPads do not give so much power out from usb as older(since they made lightning to usb-cable). Some keyboards can not get enough power from iPad usb. I have one(Roland G-600 arranger). Then what is the solution, if you want to have Ptq?
There's just one thing to Modartt to think carefully (and I believe they've already thought about that):
People aren't willing to pay anything in iOS. They are used to feel that everything should cost just couple of bucks or be free. IMO PTQ is worth every cent of its price. So what should they charge from iPTQ?
Speaking about too low pricing in iOS: I've seen many apps which have great potential (like Genome MIDI sequencer) but which do not develop at all or develop painfully slow. I believe it's because of the pricing: those developers must have another job to make their living so there's no time and meaning to put their hours to these apps. This is especially when you make an app which has relatively small market. (Of course with 2 euros app you can become a millionaire if the market is huge and app becomes popular. Like our finnish Angry Birds game…)
Yes, I think that would be a serious point of concern. There is a tendency now to have more expensive apps in the marketplace, however. I do not know how succesful that is, but it is probably a good thing for niche products. A company called Tunelab sells piano tuning software for Eur. 270,- for years now.
For Pianoteq, I suspect that you could develop an ios app in such a way that it would not eat into the existing market, but rather support it. Much in the same way that Pianoteq Stage was introduced. Personally I would love an app to control pianoteq on the PC/Mac, for example. And for the rest, I think Pianoteq is not/should not be a niche product.
And, suppose, that one day we have Ptq for iPad, but the iPad may not output enough power for your midi controller(say ”dont recognize the device”). Newer iPads do not give so much power out from usb as older(since they made lightning to usb-cable). Some keyboards can not get enough power from iPad usb. I have one(Roland G-600 arranger). Then what is the solution, if you want to have Ptq?
Yes, recognize that. From hear-say I understand Apple build this limitation in software. There are workarounds (using usb hubs), but this seems to be really something to hold against Apple.
But powered usb hub did not help. I think there is no workaround for now. Have tried over a year. By the way, anyone who know if Kawai vpc work with iPad?
By the way, anyone who know if Kawai vpc work with iPad?
I have used VPC1 with an iPhone 5S connected with an Apple camera connection kit and a powered USB hub. So iPad should work equally well. It did not work without the powered USB hub.
