just got AP

Hi, I just installed AP and gave it a whirl. Generally, I find it to be very nice. There are a few things that I didn't like:

- The soft pedal (una corda) has very little effect. I run AP off of a Yamaha CP-33, whose own piano sound has a very nice expressive soft pedal. Hopefully the AP soft pedal can be improved.

- I would have thought that there would have been 1 sample per key, but it seems that one sample is used for 5 (?) keys. The transition points are sometimes quite noticeable. Hopefully in the future NI will provide an updated sample library.

- Even at a velocity of 1 (ppp) you can still hear sound. It would be nice to have that be silent, so that you can hold notes down without sounding, to get the sympathetic resonance (with the damper pedal up). This type of resonance doesn't seem to be implemented anyway, so I guess this is not a big issue. The Pianoteq software does a very nice job of sympathetic resonance with the damper pedal up. The AP program should try to do something similar.

- The Steingraeber (at least with my midi setup) seems to have a bug on the bottom two notes. Playing either of these repeatedly provides a random switching between two different notes.

- The Steingraeber sound seems to be rather muffled in the mid-low range. I guess thats the way it sounds in real life...

- I know there are presets, but it would be nice if the settings for a piano when you left it are reintroduced when you select that piano again.

Anyways, thats my mini-review. Overall, it sounds great, especially at the high end of the keyboard.

JJ

 

On further investigation, the bug on the Steingraeber is that the note pitch is wrong on the A-1 and Bb-1 notes when the velocities are between 53 and 64 inclusive.

I looked at the individual samples in the library for the Steingraeber and they all seem to have the right pitch, so the bug must be in the sample playing engine. Peculiar that it would only happen for the Steingraeber, however.

 

Hi,

Velocity 1, Soft pedal improvement, Sympatic resonance pedal up ares implemented in the latest update. 1.1.2

Check olivier overtone presets

Regards,

Olivier

 

Thanks for the pointer, Olivier. I should have read the readme.txt file first! (but really, this information should have been in an addendum to the manual!).

It is rather peculiar that the overtone settings are only accessible in some presets, rather than always available in the Release Resonance settings. This is why I didn't find these settings until Olivier pointed it out - I just assumed that the Release Resonance setting choices are always the same. Thats the way most synths work. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future release.

The soft pedal is somewhat noticeable now, but still much more subtle than in an actual piano.

EQ'ing the Steingraeber really makes a difference (as in the WUnderkind patch). It is quite nice (except for the bug with the two lowest notes).

Thanks!
JJ