Subject:Searching for good VSTi piano or soundfont

Posted by: Djipy

Date:4/15/2005 12:35:05 AM

I'm searching for a good (the best ?) VSTi piano. The main criteria are: full compatibility with Acid 4, low CPU usage and professional quality.
Does anybody know such a plug-in ? A trial version should be useful.

I'm also using a lot of soundfonts played by Sfz. So, I would also appreciate information about a good piano "sf2" or "gig" file (free or not).
I've got some but I'm not quite satisfied : not enough velocity layers, notes not looped, etc....

Thanks.

Subject:RE: Searching for good VSTi piano or soundfont

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:4/15/2005 5:24:42 AM

I have some information about VSTi’s on the VST Instruments page of my web site. Rather than having an exhaustive list, I just have the few that I find most useful for my music. I see you are already using rgc:Audio SFZ. That an awesome little Soundfont player. Don’t forget to adjust the quality. It defaults to poo-ish but crank it up to uber++ if you have the spare CPU cycles.

The best free grand piano sound I have found is most definitely the Splendid Grand Soundfont. It comes in a 72MB and 136 MB version depending on how much memory you want to use up. That link only has the 72MB version. It's a sampled Steinway D concert Grand that Akai used with it's hardware based samplers S5000-S6000. A few years ago Akai made the sampler presets freely available for download.

BTW, probably the best listing of soundfonts I have found is at is at SynthZone. I spent a week there one night downloading all sorts of great sounds. ;-)

~jr