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This may be a silly question, but: is Wavesfactory Mercury the same as Waves Grand Rhapsody? Both seem to be sampled from a Fazioli F-228 at Metropolis Studios.

Does Wavesfactory Mercury handle half-pedaling and repealing correctly?

Does that one work on Kontact player? Or does it require Kontakt full version?

Scratch that: the user manual states that it works as standalone software.

I think the difference is - Mercury is Freddie Mercury's actual personal piano, whereas the other one is not.
Could also be sampling and layer differences in the recordings.
Mercury is about 34Gb.

But for $29 that other one is perfect for a first time VST buyer.
It's hard to go wrong with a Fazioli

I own Waves Grand Rhapsody and I cannot recommend it. Apart from the piano itself, Waves licensing mechnism is very problematic.

Is the sampling no good?

I think when you make such a statement, it is important to explain what is problematic because what is problematic to you may not be problematic to others.

I tryied demo version of this piano and also I can't recommend it, especially in not equal layers in "p" and "pp" dynamic. There are my testing samples of this piano:
https://soundcloud.com/rychubil/sets/waves-rhapsody-grand

Sampling is OK, but not on the level of other products. I would rate Garritan, Ivory, Ravenscroft or even Pianoteq much much higher.


I downloaded, installed and activated Waves Central (which is necessary to activate any Waves VST) on one laptop, in which I did not exchange a single thing, nor hardware, nor software. After one week of usage, when I tried to open Grand Rhapsody standalone, it showed "no licence" pop-up and in Waves Central my C: drive, on which I installed software was shown as disconnected. It occurs Waves takes the MAC address of your network card as an ID of your machine, so if you switch to using another one (eg. LAN instead of WIFI adapter), your device is listed as unauthorized. I "repaired" the issue by a little hack to overwrite my MAC address and it was working OK for another few weeks. Then 'no valid license' error occured again (I was still using the same network card). When I started Waves Central it forced me to update it before I start. After this I had to activate Grand Rhapsody again, but prior to that I had to de-activate it from previous device (?!), but it was still the same laptop with exactly the same configuration.

I had never such problems with other VSTs.

Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro headphones (about $130, 50%+ discount)

https://www.newegg.com/black-beyerdynamic-dt-990-other/p/0TF-00D2-00003

Pianoteq BF offers are here!

Meh...

I understand pianoteq stage is cheap enough, but i was hoping for a discount on the standard version.

Some upgrade also get a 25% discount as I just found out. I just utilized this deal to upgrade my STANDARD to PRO a few mins ago. Thanks for letting us know!

Is the Sweetwater deal still the best one on Garritan CFX?

My sentiments exactly. They already did a discount on the Pro version back this summer, and getting two further instruments included in the Pro version (beyond the Stage version) is not all that interesting, given that all the instruments sound very similar.

I guess it depends on the user. An upgrade of STAGE wouldn't have helped me since I already had STANDARD.

But it is strange that their special discount was only to Pro and Pro Bundle. Doesn't see fair for people who didn't already have STANDARD.

I did too. I really wanted to upgrade for a while now, but found the price a bit high. I wanted to add 2 instruments as well so this was a great price for me: Stage to Pro + 2 instruments for $180.

It works for those who want to upgrade to Pro from Stage, but those who just want to upgrade to Standard are not invited to the party.

Congratulations!

Did you pick all your instruments from scratch or just added new one?
Read in one of the threads on PW that you are allowed to choose all your instruments as if you newly buy PRO. I'd like to get rid of my K2 and pick another instrument...

Unfortunately, though I had read the same thing on PW, the reality is that the system only allows picking only one more instrument (it was already at STANDARD). Perhaps though If you contact customer support, they will fix this and allow you to re-pick. If you open a support ticket and get a positive response, let us know! I too have a useless K2 (and useless Steinway D ).