Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Using external samples (laptop) in lay man's language!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Behringer-U...lectronics&qid=1271344178&sr=1-1
Cost: 23.48

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Griffin-iMi...lectronics&qid=1271344231&sr=1-3
Cost: 32.05

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexicon-Alp...lectronics&qid=1271344231&sr=1-6
Cost: 62.19

http://www.amazon.co.uk/August-US01...lectronics&qid=1271344231&sr=1-4
Cost: 4.49 (Don't laugh! This one is better than you think! At least it's so cheap you can definitely give it a try!)

The Key is to set this up "backwards" start with speakers and with the piano and check each step.


We don't know what your existing laptop is. What OS does it runs, what hardware is inside. As others have said Macs come setup at the factory for making music. If this is a Windows based PC then you will need to hunt down a few parts and some asembly is required. You CAN make it work but is is not "plug and play."

What yo should do first off is make sure you can play recorded music and that you are happy with the sound quality. Just play any old MP3 file you have from iTunes. Hopefully you have some solo piano music. if Not spend $0.99 and buy a download of your favorite pianist. Then play it. There is no way, on Earth your digital piano will sound better then what you just played. It is good enough? If not stop here and fix that problem. If a profesional recording of a concert pianist playing a real acustic grand sounds like crap of you system there is zero point in going to the next step. Likely you will need to connect an amp and move the speakers around nearer to your DP. Keep working untill the sound seem to come from the piano and sounds very good.

OK now you have the output end working well. Get this end working first becaust you need it the judge the quality if the other end.

For the other end, get both "the free Kontact" player and a copy of the "Pianoteq" demeo. For non-piano sounds Kontakt is what you want. The free player comes with enough free voises so you can test it.

Now just click on the piano keys, don't use the DP or MIDI yet see if you like the sound. If you do there are hundreds of sample sets yu can install into Kontakt from drums to flutes all of varying quality and price from free to $$

Finally connect the DP to the computer. Using a MIDI to USB cable. Or if the DP has USB just a direct connection. Set the source in Kontakt to "omni" which will listen for ANY midi device. Play anot on the keyboard and it shuold be working if every previos step worked.


Next yu can go back an improve thins, add a speaci Windows audio driver to reduce latency and upgrad to a better externa audio intrface and buy beer speakers and so on.

ChrisA, thanks for that, you have explained it in exactly the simplistic way I needed. I haven't got my laptop with me at the mo as I'm at work but it's pretty new, windows 7 os, 320 gigs hard-drive etc, although slow processor. I can't remember what the soundcard is off hand. The sound will be coming through a Denon hifi. I shall try the first stage you have suggested and report back!

Hey, ChrisA, you're really great in baffling people...

We were talking about getting a sequencer and load freely available VSTi, and you're now talking about another solution with the proprietary Kontakt player. Well, this is also a possible solution, but I would guess only the second best, because Kontakt is hardware hungry and the freeware selection is somewhat limited, but still a lot.

Your other recommendations about testing the sound quality is of course good!

Thanks for those but I must be missing something, none of them have midi in or USB in, how would you connect your DP?

Directly via USB

Oh, one more thing, with all the connections (keyboard to PC, PC to amp, amp to speakers) is there a danger of noticable time delay between playing notes and hearing sounds? That would be very annoying!

Update from the techno-cripple:
Have successfully connected the laptop to the Denon and it sounds great, just played some nice piano jazz mp3 through it and sounds as good as from the ipod dock. Connection is headphones out to aux on the hifi. All I need now is to get a midi to USB cable and download some of the suggest freeware.

Kidders, you don't need a midi to USB cable for the ES6, because it has a USB-to-host interface. So you just need an ordinary USB-cable which you surely have to connect to the DP. Also no drivers needed, the DP will be automatically detected by Windows 7. I don't know if your Yamaha PSR does already have a USB-to-host interface, so this test might not work without a dedicated MIDI-interface... Maybe someone can borrow you an interface so you can perform this test, buying something doesn't make sense if your soundcard is that good.

Or maybe you can buy something really cheap like this USB-to-MIDI interface:
http://www.amazon.de/LOGILINK-USB-M...mp;s=ce-de&qid=1271358338&sr=8-1
Only 9 Euro...

Regarding time delay: This is something that can happen, but for this I advised you to install ASIO4all which will deal with this and should reduce the delay significantly so you shouln't notice it on your relatively new laptop.

Hi all, thanks again for all your suggestions. I've successfully downloaded Kontakt but it's going to take a lot of playing around to learn how to use it and add samples etc. However, in the meantime, I have made a decision on my keyboard and today ordered a Kawai ES6. Even though most of the instrument voices aren't great, the piano sample is much nicer (in my opinion) than the P155, and as I will be using it for classical piano 99% of the time then it must be the one for me. It arrives on Saturday! Can't wait!