Searching VST Piano

I have read several tests, opinions, comments and so on and cannot decide which one is best:

Akoustik Piano is my choice because it's NI.

Pianissimo is cheap and the demo version was not so bad.

SYNTHOGY IVORY GRAND PIANO was compared with NI's A P and some people wrote it's much better. With a more realistic sound then AP.


This are the 3 I found, who wants to tell his or her experience and opinion?

My problem is that I cannot play NI's AP, because there is no demo version. And I know noone that got it.

(The Mp3 don't help me to get the sound)

 

FWIW, I demo'd Pianissimo and was very pleased with it...and I almost bought it, then I found a good deal on Akoustik Piano. I can honestly say that AP sounds a lot more realistic than Pianissimo (to my untrained ear), but it is more expensive than the Acoustica product...and it has a few "rough edges" (see other posts in this forum).

All in all, I'm happy with AP, even though their support is almost non-existent...and a long-standing bug may make it impossible for me to move my DAW over to Vista as I had planned.

G

 

Thanks, I have read a comment about AP:

(lost the link) ...AP sound very artificial and everyone who played a real piano will notice that its sound too electric...

Of course: That it will never reach the sound of a real piano is clear, but do I get the feeling of playing a real piano?

 

Hm. Well, I don't think that it sounds artificial or "electric", but I do not have a trained ear. A real pianist could easily find fault with anything that doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars, and take up a whole room in your house (I'll never be that guy).

Personally, I found that both Pianissimo and AP provided the ability to play quite expressively, primarily because both allow very softly played notes (pianississimo, ppp), to sound very soft...but much of this has to do with the controller that you use. I have a Yamaha KX8, and the hammer action on it is awesome (IMO). Both programs do allow for velocity adjustments, so tuning them to a less expressive controller should be possible...and both programs provide resonance and hammer/pedal sound adjustments.

One thing to note is that Pianissimo does not consume nearly as much CPU as AP does while playing...and AP is huge (12 Gb) when compared to Pianissimo. I had to perform some major tweaking on my laptop (2 Ghz, 4 Gb RAM), to get the same latency as Pianisimo would allow on it while unmodified (Behringer FCA202 - 5.10 ms). The biggest tweak was moving the sample library to an external USB drive (highly recommended).

One more consideration is that AP has very cool sounding convolution reverb effects (which can also be changed to "regular" reverb your CPU can't handle convolution), but I believe that Pianissimo only has the "regular" reverb effects. Does this make a difference? Maybe not, but (again, IMO), the feeling of being "there" (i.e., concert hall, jazz club, etc...), is more prevalent with AP. It's subtle, but I like being able to adjust the room dynamics in AP.

G

 

Update: Support has followed up and confirmed that the issue referenced in this thread (and is also prominent elsewhere in the forum), has been escalated to development.

All communication, following my first contact (which was not so good), has been exceptional...so I must retract my earlier comment about NI support. All in all, I can HIGHLY recommend AkoustiK Piano to anyone who wants a superb Grand Piano library, given that they meet the minimum processing requirements.

G