Piano Virtual Instruments

Thanks

Have you tried "Piano In 162" (.sfz - Ivy Audio) with the Plogue Sforzando engine? They have .flac lossless samples in both close and ambient miking (Over 2GB each). Listen to some of the demos @ Ivy Audio...

This is the ARIA Player:

www.plogue.com/products/sforzando/

Ivory isn't that bad. I'm using it here just fine:

Thanks John

Garritan CFX and Ravenscroft are the top sampled libraries from 2014. Ivory American D is still pretty great, but I feel like the other Ivories are getting a bit long in the tooth. If you dont mind trying something different, Pianoteq 5 has incredible playability, but its missing a bit of the "wood" you get from sample libraries. Amazing software through, can't wait to see how close it gets to samples in another year.

thats a  super hard question for me to answer because:

- I have not been using it much lately.
I do like it very much though. and even with all the difficulty I've had, I think its my favorite.

- ok, here we go........I had a really tough time with artifacts and drop outs when I first got it.
but the customer support was absolutely top notch.
next thought...... they came out with an updated version, that was much smaller (GB size).
I think that worked much better.
next, I think it worked much better playing Ravenscroft inside UVI workstation (thats the default thingy), 
BUT, using/opening that, inside of Cantabile (thats the Synthogy Ivory host).

I will tell you that I am no expert on any of this.
try searching at Piano World, or contacting Ravenscroft support for more info.
and here's info from Piano World.
I'm minstrelman at that forum.

www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/2246820/Is_Cantabile_considered_to_be_.html

John - you should check out the impactsoundworks "pearl" piano. For me, far better than either choices you mentioned.  Alicia's is too brash and doesn't give me enough "feel" a lot of times, and as much as I wanted too like the piano in blue, I could never get it to "feel" good under my fingers.  I still like the "emotional piano" for more sparce cinematic applications. But the pearl is all over it right now.... Price is decent too. Also, they have 16b and 24b versions and "lite" versions as well so you can write with one version, and then track with the big guns loaded.....

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I was literally writing a post about this and decided to make sure there wasn't already a thread right before posting.

A friend of mine who is a Broadway actor with an big, old school voice came to me about recording an album of Broadway songs. After discussing pricing and planning the album, we settled on a cabaret style album with just him, a piano, and his guest artists. I do not have a nice piano in my home studio. I have a spinet in my living room that I could mic up, but for the style we're going for, I knew it wasn't the right choice. We decided to use my Korg Triton as a controller and use a sampled piano for the project. I have a few piano samples in my limited library which have worked on projects in the past, but were used in the context of a full orchestration, so I decided to look into some new piano libraries. While looking over the East West & Native Instruments libraries I came across Ivy Audio's Piano 162. It's really fantastic for the style I'm working with and definitely worth checking out. And did I mention it's free?

If you have a full version Kontact player it will play as a library and allow you to modify the balance between the close mics and the ambient mics. If you do not have the full version, the free version of Kontact will tell you the demo has expired and stop working every 15 mins or so. You can use Sforzando Player instead of Kontact, but can only open one sample at a time. So, you'll need two separate midi tracks to run each sample off of. Either way, this sample set is worth checking out. They have a few others as well, but I haven't tried them yet.


www.ivyaudio.com

I may have also tried the Slate VMS emulations on the audio too, with the FG12 emulation on the close mics and the FG47 emulation on the ambient mics, but that's another story.  ;-P

OK....this is part of the issue I have with people not understanding what SPECIFIC "resources" are being "hogged" by VIs.

I bought the Ivory American D....installed and am using it glitch and latency free on my nearly decade old Windows DAW. I even just did a project with VSL strings, AD2 drums, Vb3 and a few fake amps....it wasn't all running live I guess (but was all loaded and ready to go at once many parts were live at the same time going back and forth)....but, it was all running at 88.2.

I think people think disk streaming things are hogs because they're trying to run them off external drives....or magnetic system drives...or something.

Much like BFD2 was called a "hog" because it used a lot of RAM to buffer in a time when 64bit 8gb+ banks weren't typical....and some of their "presets" with all kinds of DSP all over crap used a bunch of a CPU, but never sounded better than simply enabling the outputs and using your DAW plug ins.

Anyway, it's barre none the best FEELING digital piano I've ever played. As to SOUND...it sounds great--it's more phase coherent than any of the Kontakt pianos I have--less so that the Kronos's German Steinway, but "richer" in that "we used better mics to sample it" way. Happy camper. So, "my piano" is there. It's not so different from the Kronos that end of the day--one or the other....a part written o nthe Kronos will translate to this as "same but better" rather than having to be reworked.