pianoteq on portable device

Launching an app on Android or iOS devices also takes a few seconds. So forgive me if I am confused as to why 10 seconds are a "problem". It takes longer than that just to open and prepare my acoustic piano. Boot times of several minutes would be a different matter, but those are a thing of the past. In fact a Windows 10 device wakes from power saving mode very quickly, almost as quickly as Android or iOS; also Windows tablets do exist. PTQ does run on Arm Linux, but personally my Linux days are over, especially when it comes to audio software. Drivers continue to be a mess, and while getting a low-latency, stable setup ist very much possible, you should be prepared for having to tweak it for some time, which is more or less due to a problem Android also has: very high variation in device configurations.

As to the last point, there's good reason at least to not support Andoid, and its high device variance is a big part of it. For the most part I still like the platform better than iOS, although Google as a company is a lot shadier than Apple when it comes to data protection. But there's hardly any pro music stuff available, and that's because sound drivers continue to be a hot mess. There are options for low-latency audio nowadays, but whether they work depends on your device, and you never know that before trying. So some developers have opted to offer demo or test versions of their products just so consumers can check before buying. Essentially the developer has to put in additional work to enable buyers to not-buy their product. Also Android customers are not used to things costing 100 bucks or more, and Pianoteq is competing with professional sample libraries that also cost 100s of dollars/euros, not with toy romplers on Android for 2 bucks. Maybe there would be a better market on iOS, it certainly has better driver support, but overall it's about a quarter of the mobile market (and market share at least not growing I think).

Hi mgla,

This forum discussion with recent posts about using Pianoteq on "raspberry pi" might be interesting for you. Some people are getting good results recently.

Do you need a screen in front of you while you're playing?  Another option is to buy a small MIDI controller such as the Korg nanoKontrol or the iCon iControls.  Then you can run a USB cable from your controller to your laptop or desktop computer, and have some faders and dials in front of you for changing Pianoteq settings without taking up too much space.

Apart from the rendering frequency there is not much you can configure, and due to the way Pianoteq works pretty much the only parameter that matters is polyphony. Newer versions tend to improve the modelling detail while being able to render fewer concurrent notes; i.e. as quality goes up, polyphony (slowly) goes down. On my laptop (a lower-middle tier i5) I currently get to a real-time polyphony of about 60 for most instruments with multi-mic soundstage recording and reverb effect active, which is okay for most stuff. YMMV though. A thing I have learned is especially on mobile hardware there are power saving features that don't play well with real-time applications, so the advanced performance settings will probably be your friend until you get to the point low-latency, stable and crackle-free ASIO works. (That's not really a Pianoteq problem though.)

[Addendum: said laptop is actually just an i3-6006U, which is really not very powerful at all by today's standards.]

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