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My laptop computer has a 7200rpm disk drive. The Galaxy web site says Vintage D requires 6GB (1GB for Kontact Player, 5GB for library content). Why would I need an external drive?

In the past, it's always been recommended that streaming audio samples be done from a separate hard drive other than the one that has the operating system on it. Nowadays with faster computers you can sometimes get away with not doing that, especially if you have a solid state drive, where access time is very fast.

My old XP machine, which is a C2D at 2ghz with 2gb of memory, runs Ivory 1, which is more demanding than the Vint D, just fine with the library on a separate 7200rpm hard drive. Otherwise, the processor would get overwhelmed.

There was a thread here where someone suggested trying a fast USB thumb drive for sample library playback. I don't know how successful that was..

The Kontakt Player, which is the 'brains' would need to go on the operating system hard drive.

I have an XP laptop that's older and slower than yours. It runs Ivory 1 and Vintage D on the internal drive, no problems at all.

The external drive recommendation applies when creating music from multiple tracks with multiple instruments. I'll call that "music engineering" unless someone has a better term. There is a very high demand for data, so an external drive or an SSD may be needed.

But when just playing the piano, the internal drive works just fine.

If piano libraries won't behave properly on your computer (with a 7200 RPM drive), you likely need a better computer.

I've never had great success playing piano samples with low latency and normal damper useage on a single hard drive system, but everyone's mileage is different. OTOH, Pianoteq ran great on my 1.60ghz netbook with Asio4All.

As has been said, using the Pianoteq demo or Pianissimo demo to test your system might be a good indicator of capabilities. I think Pianissimo is a great bang-for-the-buck option, but the Galaxy pianos are in another class altogether.

I am pretty happy with the Pianissimo demo and ASIO4ALL.

I have not seen a way to do an evaluation of the Galaxy Vintage D other than to buy it. Can anyone point me to a Galaxy Vintage D demo download link?

There are You Tube videos, but no demo versions of Vintage D.
Buy it! You'll like it!
Beats Pianissimo by a long mile.

Here are the Official Galaxy Youtube Tutorials and the Galaxy Piano Demos.

I know it's not as good as getting an actual demo on your computer, but believe me I've tried to download those things as sets of compressed iso files more than 4GB each and it takes forever. That's probably why most companies don't bother making a downloadable trial.

You can try Vintage D and others here.

As for how well it will run on your computer, I don't know. But it meets the minimum requirements for Vintage D.

I believe you. The other thing I am considering is the external powered speakers (Yamaha YST-M50) I will be playing through. Left and right satellite speakers plus sub woofer. Compact, portable and good for practice and small gatherings. Some of the subtleties of the elite sample programs probably would be lost, especially at higher volumes where distortion becomes more pronounced. So Pianissimo might be the right selection because it is not as good as some of the other better (and more expensive) options.

I might be the first forum participant who has posted that they are choosing one product over another because it is worse. Tah-dah! :^)

Well, since you said earlier that you just want to be able to play with expression, and since you enjoyed the old Kurzweil K1000 (I had one myself), Pianissimo would probably do you just fine since it's far more realistic.

I just picked up a box o' Pianissimo for $30 (plus $5 shipping).

Excellent buy! Congrats!

Congrats - I like the tone of Pianissimo a lot too!

Greg.

Just a note about my comparison of Truepianos, Pianoteq, and Pianissmo. My Tascam US-800 USB interface has some issues. Especially for Windows computers. Web research shows that I am not alone in this regard. These things were being unloaded for around $70. It has worked OK with my condenser mikes, but I discovered that the MIDI interface was pretty flaky depending on the software application being used. So using this USB interface, Truepianos produced the BSOD regularly, and that made it difficult and frustrating to evaluate Truepianos. Pianoteq allowed only 20 minutes of evaluation and then the software had to be reinstalled. Like 20 minutes is enough time to do an evaluation??? C'mon! Plus, PIANOTEQ DISABLED SOME OF THE KEYS IN THE DEMO VERSION!!! What idiots!!! How is that supposed to make their product look good??? Whatever. Eachtime I had to reinstall the software after the 20 minute expiration, I had to disconnect USB cable, unplug DC power from USB interface, unplug MIDI connection to USB interface, reconnect DC power to USB interface, reconnect USB cable, and reconnect MIDI to USB interface. This was the sequence of steps that seemed to work with the Tascam US-800. The evaluation of Pianoteq was so cumbersome I moved on to Pianissimo. The demo version of Pianissimo behaved the best, and that's what I evaluated for a couple days, and made my choice of the 3. Pianissimo.

The Pianoteq trial does indeed time-out after 20 minutes.

However you simply close the program and reload - it's not necessary to reinstall the software every time.

James
x

You're right. It was late when I was working on it, and now I recall what happened. When I first ran the program a message was displayed saying after 20 minutes I would have to "reload the program", and after 20 minutes elapsed, another message was displayed saying I needed to "reload Pianoteq" to continue the evaluation. At the time I interpreted those messages as a need to reinstall. So I did reinstall once, and after another 20 minutes, instead of giving up, I decided to just close the program and run it again, which worked (for another 20 minutes...). From a product evaluation perspective this sucks. For one thing, 20 minutes is not enough time. When each 20 minute cycle ended, and I was in the middle of playing something and the virtual piano went silent, my first thought was that something was wrong. Eventually I would remember that I only had 20 minutes to work with. What a lousy way to market piano sample software. From a performance and evaluation perspective, it kept dying every 20 minutes.

But what's worse is they deliberately disabled some of the notes in the demo version. So I'm playing music and stumbling along in the evaluation because notes AREN'T THERE to be played or heard.

Unbelievably bad marketing of the Pianoteq product, and the fact that they market it that way does not give me any confidence in the product itself.

Audio interface drivers make me crazy. I feel for you.

I'm glad you have had some fun times demoing these VST's. Of the three, Pianissimo is the most like a modern sampled VST, so that's a good direction to go. That doesn't necessarily mean that's the product to buy, though. It mostly just lets you know that you do, indeed, like a good sampled VST and it works ok with your computer. That being the case, I'd suggest buying a nice VST like Vintage D.

Personally I actually think PT's demo capability is fine. They disable a few keys and limit you to 20 minutes, but that doesn't seem problematic to me. Mainly one wants to get a feel for the tone and make sure it works well on one's computer. Essentially all demos time out after 20 minutes (Kontakt, for example, won't play an unregistered library after this amount of time). PianoTeq's crippled demo is actually infinitely better than other VSTs' demos, because they are completely non-existent.

I have some issues with PianoTeq's sound, but I think as a company they are the best at marketing their product that there is in the software piano world, and their interface is the best as well--actually well designed to be used by pianists.

In defense of Pianoteq, I used it for over 3 years, in fact if you look at my signature below, the album I recorded used Pianoteq. I purchased the software after evaluating it for over two months. No one gives you that long of an evaluation period. And the only inconvenience is having to restart it every 20 minutes, plus having about 6 notes that don't play. Other than that it's fully functional, and you can test it for as long as you like. I thought that was a very fair tradeoff.

Having said that, I lost interest in Pianoteq because it just doesn't sound REAL to me. Pisnissimo OTOH does sound real, although way less flexible. And it's way less expensive.

Respectfully, I could not disagree more, but if it works for you, I am happy for you.



For some musicians, getting a feel for the tone means playing music that they are familiar with, from start to finish, without the program dying, and without notes dropping out. Dealing with scheduled "failures" and missing notes interferes with the evaluation of the tone. If I go to evaluate a piano at a piano showroom, the piano should not just stop producing sound, and no notes should be disabled. Same with virtual piano software evaluations.

A few words about determining whether a product works on a computer system. "working well" on a computer means the sound does not just die completely. An evaluation of a product should not just die after 20 minutes, leaving the evaluator to figure out what went wrong. The evaluator might just dismiss the product after the first Pianoteq-induced "failure". Also, and more importantly, "working well" on a computer means that notes do not just drop off the radar screen. A new evaluator of Pianoteq has no way to know whether the missing notes he heard while playing a piece were the result of limitations in the computer, or the idiotic decision of Pianoteq to disable some (unspecified) notes. The evaluator of the product should not have to sort through these types of things.

So, from this evaluator, Pianoteq blew it.