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Insert midicurve first (virtual instrument on new track). Now, do not insert new piano instrument (VSL) and routing because it will not work. Load Midi curve and in FX Midicurve window click on add in bottom left corner and insert piano vst. Midicurve vst must be in first place and under is your piano. The both must be checked with Midi curve in first and piano in the second place. Try and see if it working.

Thank you. That worked!

VSL just released a Library update with improved velocity mapping for the Steinway D

https://www.vsl.co.at/community/posts/t50641p3-Please-welcome--Steinway-and-Sons-D-274?=#post279472

I'm curious what the consensus is among users here. I haven't tried it yet, but I will later today.

God Bless,
David

Yikes! Hasn't anyone tried the new library update? It seems to be pretty significant.

I tried it and I think it's an improvement. I don't feel like I'm whaling on the keys anymore when playing normal and I don't need an external velocity curve modification.

I don't have the technical knowledge or experience to explain what is actually taking place, but I like it.

Anybody else?

God Bless,
David

Hi,
I'm currently participating in a beta of Liquid Sonics new "Lustrous Plates." It is absolutely the best for everything, and my Piano VIs never sounded so beautiful...Ravenscoft 275, Embertone Steinway, Garriton CFX. I also have VerbSuite, and 7th Heaven..both wonderful as well. It's the ends of these Lustrous Plates that seal the deal, and it is extremely pliable. Hope this helps.

No it doesn't help because you want me to spend another €200,-

I recently bought 'Illusions' from liquid sonics and i love it.
It really warms and smoothens out the sound so much.
Also because you can change very important parameters hardly found elsewhere .
I don't think those new 'plate's' will surpass what i am coaxing out of LS illusions at the moment.
Like i said i don't need yet another 200,- reverb plug in.
Hahaha.

Sorry guys a bit of topic, but for those who have a hard time with the cold VSL sound stage, this is really something any of you should consider, because the sound is going to improve in a very natural and pleasing way when buying a top reverb plug in.


Ps forgot to say when you use the close mics available in your piano vst with as little recorded room reverb possible ... then add a top reverb plug in.
And of course people need a DAW to link all those plug ins.

The VSL Steinway D with the velocity mapping update has become my favorite piano sound. I really like the VSL CFX, but the Steinway has a more aggressive attack and clearer more penetrating sound. It really sounds and feels like hammers hitting strings when I press the keys on my MP11SE.

I'd love to try it with one of these new hybrid pianos like the NV10 or N1X. What an amazing combination that would be.

God Bless,
David

Aside from my own pianos, I use my edited PianoTeq pianos for studio tracks and live performance. Last December, I decided to add the VSL CFX and the Steinway D to the complete VSL orchestral library I use in the studio. As a tuner/tech/artist/ piano developer, I've never quite gotten used to pianos with so much ambience although it does help to position them in the stereo field. Ambience in the samples generally means, you have to build a mix around the piano rather than the other way around. I like the CFX ...it sounds realistic and is fun to play but it lacks the customary CFX brilliance especially in the lower sections of the piano making thunderous octave bass runs less than appealing. But it's still nice to have it on board. One possible explanation for a dull bass, is that CFX may have been new when they sampled it and it hadn't been fully voiced yet.

Until the Steinway was updated, it just didn't even express correctly, you couldn't play it softly without making major adjustments. VSL fixed that and I like the Steinway, but like the CFX, they both suffer from exaggerated resonance issues which are bound to interfere with other instruments unless corrected. The pianos both have too much ringing (likely due to EQ'ing and processing) and there's plenty of harmonic abnormalities (depending on what mic positions you use). Unfortunately, VSL has left the polishing work up to users who generally aren't prepared for such work. There are some notes where duplexes are ringing (hi freq spit) and a number of notes around the C6 area where the strings were not properly seated on the bridge pins. The work around is a careful selection of mic positions that can minimize the unwanted sound. The good news is, the Steinway is the first VSL piano product that is actually in tune. Even the CFX has a few layers that are out of tune with other layers of the same note so with the sustain pedal down... occasionally you hear something like unisons being out... but not so on the Steinway. Anyone familiar with the VSL Imperial, from a few years ago, knows what an out of tune piano sounds like especially in the C5 area.

Because of memory leaks in the Synchron Players, which showed up in my System 7 DAW in December when I bought the VSL pianos, I am unable to use these pianos in an orchestral setting until the memory problem is fixed (six weeks and counting). All other VSTs and programs that stream from the hard drive or SSDs work perfectly... but not the Synchron players.

What is a "memory leak" and how does it affect your playing? Thanks.

David

David, I think wdco means the memory management of the Synchron player is poorly programmed, this causes it to occupy more memory than it should and it affects his ability to create music using both Vienna symphonic library's instruments with Synchron pianos (the whole takes up too much total memory hence it's not usable).

Thanks.

I haven't tried using it while working with any other programs except for MainStage which I run it in. I haven't noticed anything wrong with Synchron pianos with the exception of the Steinway using a bit more resources than the CFX.

God Bless,
David

I had heard the term "memory leak" before but never had a clue as to what it was. Now, after six weeks of tracking the problem, researching, and analyzing how my system 7 DAW is managing memory ...here's what I've learned.

Memory leaks are the result of sloppy programming which results in the critically inefficient use of memory (RAM). For example, drivers improperly coded can swallow up memory unnecessarily or as in the case of the Synchron Piano Player and the Synchron Player for strings and percussion... there are two problems that gobble up so much memory that it limits production work. First, I want to say that as far as I can determine, the leak is not noticeable in system 10 machines for the most part. More about that in a minute.

On my system 7 machine, I have 32 gigs of RAM, a water cooled 4 core i7 (8 threads) overclocked to 3.5 Ghz. We built it in 2012 and it has remained the main studio machine for production, arranging etc. With a GeForce video card, I can easily process 4k video in Premiere Pro. So when you run out of memory, you know somethings wrong especially when you pull out the Task Manager and notice that a single instance of Synchron strings has swallowed up 10 gigs (1/3) of your RAM (including the system which is about 3 gigs). Then add a Synchron Piano and the memory jumps another 6 to 7 gigs... but not all of it immediately. It swallows 3 to 4 gigs up as you play it for say about 25 minutes. And if you're not watching the Task Manager which shows how the memory (RAM) is being used, and all you have is the two Synchron Players, you might never notice the memory hemorrhaging and the bloated player until you start loading up more tracks, VSTs, and especially when you pull out all the processing for a mix.

There are two aspects to the memory leakage which took some time to be certain it was coming from the Synchron Players. Again, this may only be a problem for system 7 users:

1. When loading a Synchron Player and prior to loading a piano or strings into it... the Player places about 2.7 gigs of memory on Standby which means its reserved and can't be used by any other program including the system. Then when I load a piano, it bloats another 2-3 gigs. If at this point you simply quit Cubase, Ableton or whatever DAW you use... the player DOES NOT return the memory it hogged so it can be used for anything else. According to programmers familiar with memory leaks, it's a common problem and it occurs because the program/player fails to clean up the memory misallocation mess and return memory for re-allocation.

2. Once the piano or strings are loaded, if you play long enough, the Player bloats and hogs even more memory unnecessarily... meaning, it uses more and more memory because its not releasing the streamed data that follows the preloaded data for each note (typically about a gig is preloaded). Again, nothing cleans up the memory mess.

These two malfunctions, make it impossible to do a full orchestral production with only 32 gigs of memory... when in fact, 32 gigs should be way more than enough.

Now to follow up on why the problem doesn't show up on system 10. My guess is that the programmers wrote the code and worked with the Players on a system 10 machine assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that system 7 manages memory the same way system 10 does. And unless you are a musician doing a large project, you might never notice the memory leaking ...so it got overlooked. It's just my theory and I don't know enough about the two systems to be sure.. But for sure, no sampled piano in the world needs to hog 10 - 12 gigs of memory including the system. A booted windows system for system 7 and 10 typically takes up about 3 gigs of RAM with nothing but the system running.

So I wanted to be sure to explain why memory leaks affect your playing and why this has been a painful learning experience because the last thing any musician wants to do is putz around with solving a sophisticated programming error the source of which... no one knows. VSL was in my computer and saw for themselves but weeks later and after providing lots of information, videos etc... the only response I could get was NOT that they were working on it... it was only that "we couldn't reproduce it here," and that was the end of it. Totally unacceptable but my only option was to be absolutely certain that my computer wasn't the problem. So, I took my computer to a good tech and indeed he found missing and corrupt system and registry files and fixed everything saying "your system and registry are now perfect. But that didn't impact the problem whatsoever. So just to be extra sure, I loaded some other streaming VSTs like VL Labs pianos (Italian and Ravenscroft), Addictive Keys, and various drum libraries which stream data from my SSDs after a preload. Each worked perfectly with no problems, no bloating, no memory that wasn't released upon program termination. What a difference. So, I have written to VSL again telling them what I have discovered and how to remedy it since I now have some memory mapping tools that have identified how the leaks are occuring.

Wow! that's interesting.

I wonder if I experience any memory leaks and don't realize it because I'm not running anything except Synchron player inside of MainStage.

I actually was thinking about upgrading my 2018 Mac mini RAM from 16 to 32GB, but it sounds like that won't matter if there is a memory leak. Thanks for sharing. Hopefully it gets resolved. Please follow-up and let us know.

God Bless,
David

Interesting stuff wdco, thank you for taking the time to write all this.
I should probably get the update and check out the current version.

Didn't Garritan CFX have a similar issue? I remember people talking about it on here.

Waste of computing resources is technically not a memory leak. A real memory leak is a software defect with completely different effects: First it doesn't bother you unless you repeatedly use the broken code path for a long time. Each time you do that, the application allocates more memory and at some point it runs out and crashes.


Do you have a correctly configured pagefile of plenty size (try "automatic" settings)? If you disabled it, then there is your problem.


If you quit an application, all memory assigned to it is freed by the operating system.


I guess you misconfigured your "system 7", have a look at the suggestion above.

And here I was wondering what kind of DAW was a system 7... it’s Windows 7, the operating system. So the CPU you are using is a Core 3xxx. I have issues producing music with a Core i7 4790k and I use NI’s Komplete for my orchestral sounds which is way lighter. Are you sure the CPU is up to the task? Judging from the posts here people with machines of comparable compute power to mine have issues running the Synchron Steinway with more than 2-3 mics, alone. The thing is a beast.

There are some posts about that problem.

Garritan CFX Full can use a ton of RAM on Windows 10. And that RAM usage creeps up over the course of a few hours.

My solution was to buy 32GB RAM and turn off the PC at least once a day.

I have only Cubase AI, Pianoteq and Ivory II American Concert D as VSTi, they run fine on a Celeron 1007U dual-core at 1.5 GHz with 8 GB RAM.

JoeT, how many instruments on average are present in one of your works? Because wdco talks about orchestral works.

Does anyone have any custom settings they'd like to share for the VSL Steinway, now that we have a velocity mapping update? I was never able to get a sound or playability experience that I really enjoyed, and the amount of customization is quite staggering. In particular, I was hoping to somehow mellow out the natural brightness of this instrument.