Acoustica Pianissimo - Windows

I had Sonar X1 Studio, and was looking for a decent sounding Piano VST. I found this product excellent.I bought it in November, and despite its wonderful performance, my old dual core 32 bit computer would not catch up with so many virtual instruments - I upgraded t o 64 bit 4 core Intel machine. However, I lost my registration card, and was absolutely helpless. I called the Seller "Music Studio Direct". I couldn't believe me ears - a real person (Arnie) picked up the phone immediately . I did not have much hope, but he spent almost an hour with me guiding -- went through old records - traced the order - located the Pianissimo person, sent her/ me the emails, and before I arrived home from office, I had both registration id and code already mailed out by Pianissimo. I think the combination of a very affordable/decent sounding product with this level of customer care is hard to find these days.

I agree with the reviewers above -- this sounds superb. It is the best sounding piano for a PC I've played -- this includes a number from respected names like Yamaha, Roland (Edirol), Sampletank and Native Instruments. It sounds incredibly natural and is relatively light of the CPU. It has a few good preset models, a very good adjustable reverb, other nice settings (velocity control, simluated pedals, sympathetic resonance and piano lid position) and a simple, intuitive interface. The standalone version (included in the box, along with the plug-in version) launches quickly and plays and records midi without fuss. If you simply want to play piano, it is a five star product.I am only giving it two stars, however, due to what I only recently discovered is actually a known bug -- it needs 250 mb of RAM (which in and of itself is not a big problem) which must be contiguous. What this means is that if you use it in a multitrack project where you use enough other virtual instruments, you can run into a problem where Pianissimo, once inserted, can't access enough contiguous RAM, and so won't load properly the next time you open the project.Here's an example. Recently I created a project where piano was pivotal; I loaded in Pianissimo, then a number of other virtual instruments, so in the end I had worked out an arrangemnent for about 10 virtual instruments in all. I saved and closed it, and all was ok. When I reopened it, however, Pianissmo would not load -- an error message said to either reinstall the program or contact tech supoort. I did the latter. I was told to be sure Pianissimo was the first instrument loaded in the project. Well, I'd already done that; but anyway, I started the project again, loading it first again. I then added the other instruments, recreated the project, saved and closed it -- and the same problem occurred the next time I re-opened.Turns out tech support had failed to share with me an important piece of information (which is actually tucked away on the company's own website; shame on me for not scouring it closely enough; shame on them for not mentioning it to me, and not making it more conspicuous to begin with) -- namely, that in such cases, Pianissimo needs to be the first instrument loaded EVERY TIME the project opens. The only way to do this is to open the last saved version, remove all other instruments, load in Pianissimo, then reload the other instruments, and then reapply any FX and routing configuration you've used. Every time! Even though my total RAM usage was only around 75%.This should not happen -- I've been able to use other instruments when RAM usage was close to 95%. Effectively having to recontruct the instument structure and configuration from scratch every time I reopen a moderately complex project is a huge hassle and time drain. It also reveals inexcusably buggy software design. I have around 40 virtual instruments, some of which predate Pianissimo by a few years, and Pianissimo is the only one with this flaw.So, if you want a virtual piano for projects which will include other RAM-using virtual instruments, to be on the safe side, look elsewhere, unless you are certain in advance that their RAM demands will be quite small, or unless you like setting up your projects over and over again.

I can't comment on how this plug sounds while playing a computer connected keyboard. I've got some royalty free pre-recorded midi files and pianissimo just doesn't cut it. My midi files sound too mid-rangey. It sounds like there's too much activity in the 250 hz to around the 2K range (Too boxy and ringy). EQ aint helped with this plug either. So I guess if you're playing a keyboard where you have some control over the equalization before recording a piano file. This plug might work good. I will try it with a midi keyboard hookup one day versus attempting to use pianissimo with pre-recorded midi files. Also it may be best after recording if you're using a midi keyboard, to mute all of the tracks in the song except for the piano track and mix that track down to an audio file. Can't speak for every user. But I can time-stretch my files to fit in with the tempo of the song, and add the from midi to audio converted file to my song projects. That decreases ram usage on my computer and eliminates the pianissimo troubles.I agree with one of the other reviewers that the pianissimo plug will fail to load from time to time when you open projects. It is a little buggy. Luckily for me I got pianissimo with the Mixcraft 5 or 6 studio as an upgrade. I think the acoustica piano virtual instrument bundled with Mixcraft is better and less troublesome than pianissimo. Will update if this plug ever meets my needs .

sounds really good, but cd failed on second reinstall, but you can download the program from the website and load in the keycode.