Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards My Piano VST Review #2 - Garritan CFX Lite

At first, the only reason I chose this VST was the price. It was only 59 USD in Sweetwater, on the other hand, the full version was around 180 USD. You reget less when you pay less. That's how I started with it. But, now it is one of my main piano VSTs for my released albums and YouTube clips.

The difference between full and lite version is in mic setting and perspectives. Full version has 2 mic settings(Close & Ambient) and 3 perspectives(Classic, Contemporary & Player) on the other hand, lite version has only 1 mic setting which is "Close mic" and only "Classic" perspective. This lite version library has around 25 GB of samples and as its product name shows, YAMAHA's CFX Concert grand piano was sampled at Abbey Road studio in London.

In the sample video, I played the Forrest Gump Main Theme which was slightly arranged by me. I still remember the first feeling when I watched this movie for the first time, especially the feather scene. Its simple but sweet and concrete melody still reminds me of my good memories of my old days till these days.

Let's talk about the sound in detail. Many people ask me my ideas about piano libraries in comparison with Keyscape's C7 piano. But this one sampled different piano. YAMAHA's CFX Concert grand which is bigger than C7 and also has a unique timbre. So that I cannot tell you which one is better as these pianos have totally different characters. This library has lots of ambient by default. I guess Abbey Road studio's room acoustic was fully mixed in the VST when Garritan sampled this piano. As a result, when you play it, you may not need any additional reverbs. But, it may be a minus if you prefer a crystal clear tone just coming from the close mics. Are you a new age or pop pianist? This might be a perfect option for you.

IMHO, CFX's overall timbre is way clearer than C7 thanks to its long body and strings. And it sounds just warm and natural in my ears.

About the dynamics, I don't feel any compressors running when I hit the keys more than 100 of velocity which is very important for most of the piano players when choosing piano VST.

Take a look at the setting I used below when I recorded the sample video. From the Default setting, I gave bit more Mid and Low gains. That's it. One of the merits of this library is that you don't need much knob tweakings for a good sound. You just play it out of the box.

The only con I have with this VST is loading time. It takes a fairly long time to get ready for playing even though this version is the light one.

Next time, I will try to review the full version which I just bought.

How did you like the sound? Please feel free to leave some comments or your ideas for more talk. Hope you have peace and comfort listening to my music.

*My Piano VST Review #1 - Spectrasonics Keyscape

I don't think this is related to the software itself, but your computer. I bought CFX Lite a few weeks ago. When loading a preset I could go get a cup of coffee, it took 2 minutes to load. A few days later I upgraded my RAM en put an SDD in my computer instead of the HDD drive. Now, presets are loading in 5 seconds.

Tim

Exactly! It loads very fast with an SSD.

I never had Lite (only Full), but once the samples are cached, it does start up pretty quickly (5-10 seconds). If the cache is flushed for any reason, it still takes a couple of minutes to load because it has to do so from scratch (and this is on a current gen MBP with a fast CPU/SSD and 16GB RAM).

So regardless of your machine, if you quit/restart the app it'll likely load up quickly. But at first launch or if you reboot or run a lot of other apps inbetween, I wouldn't be surprised if it took much longer.

I have CFX Lite now for a few weeks, this is my first VST I bought and I have nog regrets. Soundwise: this is really what I would expect from a VST and the reason to use it instead of my internal sounds (Kawai CA-17). To me this sounds what the piano playing experience should sound like: a living breathing instrument. It resonates like a real piano, it sounds real, very organic... After half an hour af playing I switched to (the demo version) Pianoteq... wow what a difference, modeling really still has a long way to go. Playing chords with Pianoteq, there is always something not quite right. Not so with CFX lite.

What struck me the most was the playability. When playing CFX lite I can feel the dynamic range I experience from playing a real grand. There are much more nuances than with the internal sounds of my piano.

So to me this is the closest experience to playing a real grand right here at home.

Tim

It is the initial loading that takes a long time when starting up the firs time. AFAIK there is no way around that. I never timed it but perhaps a minute on my system.

Also, it depends if it is still in cache. If it is still cached from a previous session it literally loads in seconds. Preset are different because it does not have to load in all the samples again, so they too usually also take a few secs or so. It may be different if you have Optane or one of those PCI based NVMe SSDs, which are much faster still and can do parallel reads and are not being bottlenecked in the same way the ancient AHCI based SATA drives are, but even so I suspect the software may well not take advantage of that anyway.

I have one of those PCI based SSDs drives for my OS now, and I can say it is amazingly fast, the future is set for terabyte virtual instruments but my CFX lite is on a conventional sata SSD which is much slower, that initial load up after the computer is switched on still takes a minute or so, As I said I never timed it, anyway, it is much longer than any other VST. So I think the OP is correct to comment on it.

I also suspect that there was perhaps an oversight somewhere in the development that caused this, because such long loading times suggest it was implemented in a very inefficient manner reading in bits spread over loads of those small files. Anyway, in theory it should not be necessary.

edit: Gombessa beat me to it.

Hi Tim. I guess my laptop may not be a decent one even though I run this VST on an SSD. When I load it the first time after pc is on, it takes around 2 mins.
Probably it is time to upgrade my CPU and RAM.
Bottom line, there are no cons for this VST

Keunyoung Song

I have the CFX full version on a SATA SSD drive, and first time after a reboot, it loads both mics in about 20 seconds (subsequent restarts of the application within a session are much faster as observed by others). My machine is okay but about five years old now so hardly state-of-the-art.

One performance tip for Windows users: add the Garritan folder (and its subfolders) as an exception in Windows Defender (and/or any other realtime antivirus software protection you use). That does make a substantial difference to the startup time; it felt like it almost halved it in my case.

I run CFX full version on a Dell XPS laptop (i5 6300HQ) with a Samsung 850 SATA SSD; it takes just under 35 seconds to load.

I tried it also on a newer Dell XPS laptop with an excellent Samsung nvme SSD and loading times were about the same (i7 7700HQ, Samsung 961).

Tried both systems with 8GB & 32GB RAM; no difference noted.

Even low end desktops may run speedy nvme drives (much) faster than laptops in the real world. And your system settings could significantly impact loading times.

I really like CFX Lite but after being open for a few hours it starts popping and I have to restart. I also have Keyscape but my 2013 iMac can't handle it.

An additional item was just added in my Black Friday wish list, PCI based SSD.
Can you notice the big difference in booting time between PCI based SSD and the conventional ones?

I wish you luck . btw worth double checking up on just in case you didn't, that you get what you want. Some older system will only will run M.2 SSDs in the old fashioned SATA mode, it depends on the system you have. It is not a disaster, but such SSDs cannot run faster than conventional SSD for the same reasons due to the old SATA interface, in the end it comes down to the motherboard chipsets & what it supports.

As a (rough) rule of thumb for a single drive 25 X HHD speed = 5 x AHCI SATA SSD = 5 x AHCI SATA mode PCIe = 1 x NVMe SSD, and then there are optane configurations too.

Some sata ssd can run run faster in "rapid" mode, found on many samsung models for example , and various ways they can be configured to speed up with extra software configs. I am guessing here, but this why I think some above report faster loading times than other with different SSDs and system configurations. it is not just down to needing the latest and greatest fast PCs as such that govern disks speeds.

To answer your question about boot times, I did not notice it, It was already very fast to boot from SATA SSD, subjectively the same, I suspect because it is no longer a bottleneck in boot times. I mean the BIOS checks on current system take longer, once it is past that, window displays immediately with the login prompt within a couple of seconds or so and is ready to go.

Thanks for the review by the way, it would be interested to see when/if you review the full version what you think of it. I am happy with lite, while the extra mics may be the nice. I am not sure it is worth it (for me).

For boot time and general use, most users won't ever notice a difference between a good SATA SSD (e.g. Samsung) and an nvme SSD.

For some useless benchmarks & some highly specific tasks, the nvme can run much faster. The benefit is probably reduced in most laptops due to motherboard power/size optimisations.

Outside of useless benchmark scores, I didn't notice any difference between Samsung SATA & nvme drives on my two laptops. Ever.

All that said, the price difference between GOOD SATA & GOOD nvme drives has fallen over the past few years. And the technology has matured. Samsung is no longer the only game in town so you have plenty of nvme choice.

*** If you are on a budget, not running specialized tasks, GOOD SATA SSDs are still a good option (in all my computers now). If you are running a high-performance, modern desktop, running specialized tasks that can utilise extra speed of nvme, have extra cash waiting to be burned, and/or might want to use the SSD in a future computer, nvme might be a good investment.

As you say, it depends on the use case since I bought the NVMe drive for a specific reason (nothing to do with music) but work related so I had a play around with it a home too. NVMe improved performance significantly because the particular numerical problems I use it for involves storing numeric data as files in interim steps, since there is no way huge matrices can all fit in RAM at anyone one time, so looping through all these data elements it helps having such fast read write/read performance, then it really scales more or less as the benchmarks show. For specific professional use it has huge benefits (for no code changes).

I used to run CFX full on a 2010 bottom-end iMac with zero problems. How much RAM do you have?

8 GB and no way to add more without major surgery. CFX loads pretty fast and runs fine for the first few hours, but by the end of the day it starts acting up.

I guess it's time for a new computer.I think there's a conspiracy amongst the computer makers and software makers. That is ... over time new software comes out, and it eats up more memory and other resources ... requiring a bigger computer ... which then makes it possible for even newer software to eat even more memory and other resources.

Face it: we're snake bit. Five years from a computer is about all you can get.

This VST looks very promising. Unfortunately I don't run Windows or MacOS. I run Linux. If they make a Linux version, I'd purchase it right away. Until then I'm sticking with Pianoteq