Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards UVI Grand Piano for Mac - anyone tried it?

Looks interesting for the price ($30). The demos certainly sound like a Steinway:
http://www.uvi.net/uvi_grand_piano_mac-app-store_en.php

Sounds ok - no better than ok - some of the demos are more convincing than others. But it's a great price and promises simplicity. Interesting product.

Steve

I was about to ask the same thing, it's absurdly cheap and doesn't sound bad at all. Something tells me the demos are poor quality, there seems to be a little distortion/clipping which I would hope is the recording not the piano! It may sound better than the demos suggest.

The you tube video sounds pretty good. I'm really tempted to give it a try! There's only two reviews at the moment but the only real criticism is of the dynamics which probably isn't surprising given the price. Maybe I'll wait a week or two and see what other reviews pop up.

I haven't see the YT stuff. I found watching the video demo on the uvi site that the dynamics not only sounded wrong, they LOOKED wrong, assuming the video was of the actual audio recording. Seemed to lack bite and despite what looked like serious effort on the part of the player, the tonal change seemed compressed/bland. But I too am tempted for the sake of 20 odd quid.

Steve

Yes it's the same video, I agree about the dynamics but I'm hoping that someone has just been heavy handed with the compressor! BTW it's just £17.99 on the UK app store!

Anyone running Windows 7 (and possibly Vista) listening to this demo should check that your soundcard is configured for a sample rate of 44.1kHz. It may be on 48kHz.

At 48kHz, I can hear artifacts, especially on the low notes.

XP users need not be concerned.

Greg.
p.s I am documenting this problem on the MSDN Pro Audio Developers Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Fo...ead/725546ce-57bf-40d0-b7aa-47e51de9c3ae

Well, I've decided to take the plunge......and am waiting for the download to complete so will keep you posted once I've got it up and running. High-speed Boardband in NZ is an Oxymoron so it'll probably be tomorrow.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it!

Just wondering how you got on?

Yes, me too....

I downloaded it last week and my first impression was that the sound was rich but a little muddy with the sustain pedal. But that was with the settings at default. I've not had the time to make any adjustments. I do actually like it more than the onboard pianos of the PX330.

Thanks for the info!

What the heck, I went ahead and bought it. Considering the price it's astoundingly good! The tone is nice and definitely Steinway like, at least to my ear, latency is non existent, timbre changes nicely with touch and it's just nice to play, it feels quite responsive and organic.

But!....and it's a big but, the volume barely changes at all, from the lightest pp to hitting the keys as hard as I dare the volume is almost constant. It's so bad that it HAS to be a bug so I'm hopeful that they'll fix it in an update they really can't have intended it to play like this!

If they can improve it even a bit I'd give it 5 stars, as it is 3.5.

Edit the tone suffers from c4 to b4 (I think! second octave above middle c) and sounds more like an epiano. I haven't noticed any muddiness when using sustain though.

Edit2:The epiano thing seems to be my headphones (which are fine with Pianoteq and other sampled pianos I have) the sound is much better through speakers.

I agree that for the money, it's okay. And Apple does seem to regularly upgrade their apps so maybe with enough reviews on the apple site they will be able to improve it.
I didn't notice the volume thing or the epiano sound but the downside is that there's not much tweaking you can do. Of course, I don't think that Apple intended for this app to rival any of the vp programs out there.

Odd that you haven't noticed the volume issue, I don't see how it could be a system or keyboard issue since the timbre changes with velocity and the different velocity curves don't help they just make it quiet all the time or loud all the time.

I contacted the developer UVI about this and they said they will be releasing a free update this week which gives the player more control over the velocity curve - hopefully that will help.

Be sure to let us know what you think when you've downloaded their update...I'm likely to have a go with this...I'm only hesitating because of the hassle factor...for the money it is difficult to be too critical but the volume issue clearly needs sorting.

Cheers,

Steve

Just on my initial and time-limited playing, I noticed not only the Volume issue, but also some tonal differences in the notes below middle-C.

Some are sounding a lot more "mellow" than others. I'm not talking about Velocity or Volume, but more tonal quality.

I may not be explaining myself too well here, but the C below middle-C is quite tonally different than the B next to it which almost sounds like it was derived from a different sample.

I'll spend some time on it early this week and try and get a more 'sensible' report back on it.

Having said all the above - it's actually not too bad. Far from perfect, but pretted damned good for the money. And I suspect it should get better with time.

I've just been fooling around with it again and if you use the virtual keyboard built into the app the volume changes as it should so the new version could improve things a lot. I'll post once I've tried it anyway.

ok, I did just notice the f# has a "ting" to it if the reverb is notched up significantly. I still did not notice difference in tone from c to c but that's probably my ear. The volume does go up to 6 or so and I can play softly or loudly within a piece. I'll be interested to see the update. I still say it was worth $30.

Well they released an update and it is better, they've added user controls for the velocity curve, pedal and pedal release volume and a 3 band parametric equaliser. Sounds like a lot of features but I haven't found them easy to use, that said I haven't experimented that much.

I had a quick play with the equaliser and found modest changes didn't affect the sound that much and large changes made it sound worse. I'm not very experienced with equalisation though so someone more expert may do better.

The velocity curve control is a little disappointing, you can only drag on the centre to make the curve more intense up or down, you can't change the end points and you can't drag the mid point closer to either end so it doesn't give you a huge amount of control.

I have managed to tweak it to get a reasonable dynamic range but I find it quite hard to play delicately. More experimentation might sort that out though.

Of course it's easy to forget how cheap this is and become over critical, if they continue to improve the app to make it more responsive rather than just add features it could become a pretty decent instrument.